February 12th, 2021

Perhaps the best introduction to Jaqueline Woodson is in her own words, from her 2016 memoir and winner of the National Book Award, Brown Girl Dreaming:

February 12, 1963. I am born on a Tuesday at University Hospital, Columbus, Ohio, USA, a country caught between black and white. I am born not long from the time or far from the place where my great-great-grandparents worked the deep, rich land unfree, dawn 'til dusk, unpaid, drank cool water from scooped-out gourds, looked up and followed the sky's myriad constellation to freedom. I am born as the South explodes - too many people, too many years - enslaved then emancipated. But not free. The people who look like me keep fighting and marching and getting killed so that today, February 12, 1963, and every day from this moment on, brown children like me can grow up free, can grow up learning and voting and walking and writing wherever we want. I am born in Ohio. But the stories of South Carolina already run like rivers through my veins.

The author of more than two dozen books for adults and children, Woodson’s prose and poetry often center around the themes of gender, sexuality, class, and Black society and history. “[I wanted] to write about communities that were familiar to me and people that were familiar to me. I wanted to write about communities of color. I wanted to write about girls. I wanted to write about friendship and all of these things that I felt like were missing in a lot of the books that I read as a child,” Woodson says of her work.

Staying true to herself and her readers, both young and old(er), has led to esteemed recognition of Woodson’s writing. Last year she was awarded the biggest international prize in children’s literature, the Hans Christian Andersen Award, and in October was named a 2020 MacArthur Fellow. Reflecting on her life since winning the HCAA to The Cut, Wooden says:

[...] I think I’m probably the first American in 20 years — and the first Black person in even more years — to win it [...] [P]eople have started understanding what I’m trying to do with the work I’m doing, and that feels really, really good. So it hasn’t changed my life in a big way, only that I can continue my work on Baldwin, and I’m sure people look at me differently now. If this is what people need to measure someone, then they can have that.

Woodson also started Baldwin for the Arts (mentioned above), an artist colony based in Brewster, NY for writers, composers, and visual artists of color, as a response to often being one of the only people of color at other retreats and colonies. The goal of Baldwin is to provide “a space for BIPOC artists where they don’t have to explain, where they can just come and do their art and be around people who know what the struggle is to be an artist of color here in this country especially at this moment in time.” She splits her time between Baldwin and Park Slope, where she lives with her partner and two children.

Jacqueline Woodson, Writer | 2020 MacArthur Fellow