The writing that I have found to be most false is the writing that doesn't offer hope.
— Jacqueline Woodson
My sister taught me how to write my name when I was about three. I remember writing my whole name: Jacqueline Amanda Woodson. I just loved the power of that, of being able to put a letter on the page and that letter meaning something.
I'm usually working on several things at once. If I get bored with one, I can go on to another. That way, I never get stuck.
I always say I write because I have questions, not because I have answers. It's true that you begin the conversation - that's the role of the artist. But it's not my job to tell us what to do next. I wish I had those tools.
In the daytime, I was expected to be the straight-A student. I was expected to be college bound. I was expected to be a great big sister. And then at night, I was just a club kid.
I can't write about nice, easy topics because that won't change the world. And I do want to change the world - one reader at a time.
I have a short attention span, so when one book isn't working out, I just work on another.
In young adult novels and children's books, you stay in moment. The story goes through a school year or a weekend. You never get a sense of a future self because the young person has not lived that yet.
I didn't know how many independent bookstores had amazing wine lists until I toured with 'Another Brooklyn.'
When I was a kid, I got in trouble for lying a lot, and I had a teacher say, 'Instead of lying, write it down, because if you write it down, it's not a lie anymore; it's fiction.'
I think, as a kid, turning on the television and seeing that everyone seemed to be wealthy and white made me feel like an outsider, lesser than. I was not wealthy. I was not white.
I think it's so important that, if I'm writing about the real world, I stay true to it. I think that kids do compartmentalize, and they're hopefully able to see it from a safe place of their own lives and, through that, learn something about empathy.
My mom was a big fan of Al Green... James Brown we weren't allowed to listen to, so of course I knew James Brown.
I think when I was a young person, there was just kind of - there was very little dialogue about it. And there was just kind of one way to be gay, right? You saw very effeminate guys. You saw very butch women. And there was no kind of in-between. And there was no - you know, there wasn't anything in the media. There wasn't anything on television.
I don't want my kids to have to walk through a world where they have to constantly explain who they are and who their family is.
The South was very segregated. I mean, all through my childhood, long after Jim Crow was supposed to not be in existence, it was still a very segregated South.
In the family, writing wasn't anything anyone understood - being a writer in the real world? How could it be? We didn't have those mirrors.
My grandparents were wealthy; my mom was not. I would walk into these worlds of privilege and then walk back into this other world. My little brother is biracial. So race and economic class and sexuality - these were always issues that were a part of my life.
My writing is inspired by where I come from, where I am today, and where I hope to go some day.
People who are living in economic struggle are more than their circumstances. They're majestic and creative and beautiful.
Young people are often ignored and disregarded, but they are acute observers and learners of everything we say and do.
I think that's important: to know 'the other,' as a means of coming to understanding.
I still love Carson McCullers and Raymond Carver and Toni Morrison and James Baldwin.
Everything I write, I read aloud. It has to sound a certain way and look a certain way on page.
The Great Migration can get forgotten if we don't pay attention or bear witness to it. It's part of my personal history and the history of millions of African Americans who left those oppressive conditions for better lives in the North. It's important to put that on the page.
I love writing for young people. It's the literature that was most important to me, the stories that shaped me and informed my own journey as a writer.
The civil rights movement was about access to public space. We had to fight for public space.
I think there is much more queer visibility than there was when I was a kid. There is marriage, more trans visibility, and many more celebrities who are open about the sexuality. This was so not the case when I was a kid.
I do believe that books can change lives and give people this kind of language they wouldn't have had otherwise.
I'm fascinated by adult women who don't have close friends and how that could come to be. I think when you're a kid, the relationships are so intimate, and you're so connected to your girls, so what becomes of them? What could possibly happen to have you become an adult woman and no longer have that?
My mom was very strict. And we were very religious. So I knew that I was not allowed to do the wrong thing. And I knew that I had a home I could run to. And I had a mom.
I feel like I'm a New Yorker to the bone. But there is a lot of the South in me. I know there is a lot of the South in my mannerisms. There's a lot of the South in my expectations of other people and how people treat each other. There's a lot of the South in the way I speak, but it could never be home.
When someone says to me, 'I love your book - I read it in a day,' I want to tell them to go back and read it again.
We, as adults, are the gatekeepers, and we have to check our own fears at the door because we want our children to be smarter than we are. We want them to be more fully human than we are.
Every time you revisit a book, you get something else out of it.
My family is big, complicated, and beautiful - and keeps me smiling and whole. It's so important to have family, whether it's biological family, good friends, foster families, or a group of aunties who are raising you. The idea of feeling isolated is scary to me - to walk through the world alone would be heartbreaking.
What I write comes from a place of deep love, and a deep understanding of all kinds of otherness.
I didn't have any idea of what I was getting into by going away to college. And I was scared. I was scared of failing. I was scared of it not being for me because I was going to be one of the first people in my family to go off to college.
Each book I write is a shout into the silence and a prayer and a plea for change.
I read a lot of the books that I love again and again and again and try to understand how the writer did it.
I rewrite a lot until I get the rhythm and story right on the page.
I don't believe there are 'struggling' readers, 'advanced' readers, or 'non' readers.
I feel like once I say out loud, to the public, what I'm working on, it's never going to be an actual book. So until it's close to done, I keep pretty quiet about my next stuff!
I think, even though homophobia still exists, there is much more of a dialogue and a taboo around being homophobic.
Both racism and homophobia come from a sense of the presumed and the unknown.
The conscious imprinting that happens between, say, 10 and 16 is huge. I think it's so important for me as a writer to stay open to the memories of that period because they were so formative.
To be poet laureate is to try to spread the love and the accessibility of poetry to young people.
Even after Jim Crow was supposed to not be a part of the South anymore, there were still ways in which you couldn't get away from it. And I think once I got to Brooklyn, there was this freedom we had.
I think there is such a richness to the South and a lushness and a way of life.
The more specific we are, the more universal something can become. Life is in the details. If you generalize, it doesn't resonate. The specificity of it is what resonates.
