Jacqueline Woodson

About Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson was born on February 12, 1963, in Columbus, Ohio, and grew up dividing her time between Greenville, South Carolina, and Brooklyn, New York—a childhood split between two very different Americas that would become a lasting theme in her writing. She studied at Adelphi University and later at The New School, where she focused on writing for children. Her first novel, Last Summer with Maizon, appeared in 1990, and she has since published dozens of picture books, middle-grade novels, and works for young adults.

Woodson writes most often through the eyes of Black girls and young women, using spare, lyrical prose to take on subjects—interracial friendship, incarceration, sexuality, class, and grief—that are rarely treated so directly in books for young readers. Her honors include the National Book Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Hans Christian Andersen Award, and the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, the two highest international honors in children's literature. She also served as the Poetry Foundation's Young People's Poet Laureate and as the Library of Congress's National Ambassador for Young People's Literature.

Notable Works

Brown Girl Dreaming (2014), a memoir written in verse about her childhood between the North and South during the civil rights era, won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature and swept the Newbery Honor, Coretta Scott King Award, and NAACP Image Award in the same year. If You Come Softly (1998), an earlier novel about an interracial teenage romance that ends in tragedy, remains one of her most enduring—and most challenged—books.

Facing Censorship

Because her work so often centers Black characters and addresses race, sexuality, and family structures that some adult readers consider too mature for children, Woodson's books are recurring targets of removal requests in school libraries. If You Come Softly and Brown Girl Dreaming have both been challenged or restricted in districts around the country. Woodson has consistently argued that young readers deserve books that reflect the full range of their own experiences, rather than a sanitized version of the world.