Jacqueline Woodson

About

Jacqueline Amanda Woodson (born February 12, 1963) is an American writer of books for children and young adolescents. She is best known for Miracle’s Boys, and her Newbery Honor-winning titles Brown Girl Dreaming, After Tupac and D Foster, Feathers, and Show Way. After serving as the Young People’s Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017, she was named the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, by the Library of Congress, for 2018 to 2019. Her novel Another Brooklyn was shortlisted for the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction. She accepted the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in 2018 and the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2020. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2020.

Jacqueline Woodson was born in Columbus, Ohio, and lived in Nelsonville, Ohio, before her family moved south. During her early years she lived in Greenville, South Carolina, before moving to Brooklyn at about the age of seven. She also states where she lives in her autobiography, Brown Girl Dreaming.
As a child, Woodson enjoyed telling stories and always knew she wanted to be a writer. Her favorite books when she was young were Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl” and Mildred D. Taylor…