I think people are willing to talk about anything if you come to it with kindness.
— Jacqueline Woodson
With my writing, I try to do stuff I have not done before. Each time I sit down, I want to have a new experience, and by extension, I want my readers to have a different experience.
Labeling is not the best way to get young people to deeply engage in reading.
'Brown Girl Dreaming' was a book I had a lot of doubts about - mainly, would this story be meaningful to anyone besides me? My editor, Nancy Paulsen, kept assuring me, but there were moments when I was in a really sad place with the story for so many reasons. It wasn't an easy book to write - emotionally, physically, or creatively.
The strength of my mother is something I didn't pay attention to for so long. Here she was, this single mom, who was part of the Great Migration, who was part of a Jim Crow south, who said, 'I'm getting my kids out of here. I'm creating opportunities for these young people by any means necessary.'
'Another Brooklyn' came to me in this kind of dreamlike series of vignettes.
If someone has something they're really passionate about, that's their brilliance, and my big question is how do we grow that passion/brilliance and/or help them grow.
What I learned for myself... is that no matter what the circumstances, people survive.
I deeply believe in many Christian values: love people; do the right thing; know that there's good in everyone, that God's looking out for all of us.
I think 'Miracle's Boys' made more people aware of my work.
Sometimes, when I'm sitting at my desk for long hours and nothing's coming to me, I remember my fifth-grade teacher, the way her eyes lit up when she said, 'This is really good.'
Told a lot of stories as a child. Not 'Once upon a time' stories but, basically, outright lies. I loved lying and getting away with it!
A 10-year-old knows a lot. If you think she or he isn't noticing the world around them, you're missing a lot.
When I was a child, we never began a meal without prayer. We thanked God for the food, for each other.
By the time I was in fifth grade, I was dreaming of the Pulitzer Prize.
For my family, 'black-ish' is the reward on a Thursday evening - a day after the show officially airs, when it's finally available to be streamed.
Greenville, S.C., in the 1970s is a rolling green dream in my memory now.
If you have no road map, you have to create your own.
Reading equals hope times change.
People want to know and understand each other across lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability.
I love how much love there is in the world of young adult and children's literature.
I feel like, as a person of color, I've always been kind of doing the work against the tide.
In writing 'Another Brooklyn,' I had to imagine what happens when friendships dissolve.
I wrote all the time, and I had teachers who encouraged it.
When I write, I don't think about messages for my readers.
I feel like I am walking in some amazing footsteps of writers who have come before me, like S.E. Hinton, Walter Dean Myers, Christopher Paul Curtis, Richard Peck and Kate DiCamillo, who I love.
I love the physical act of writing as well as how I grow which each situation I put on the page.
I am still surprised when I walk into a bookstore and see my name on a book's binder.
Hope is universal.
Who are you without your girls? I truly believe that. Who are you without the people who help you make sense of the misogyny, the racism, the economic struggle, all of it? You need those people saying you're a good mom, a great writer. You're a great dresser. You cook well. Whatever the beauty is that you need to hear.
In all my childhood, I never heard my grandparents say that anything shocked or surprised them. They knew what their country was capable of.
In the midst of observing the world and coming to consciousness, I was becoming a writer, and what I wanted to put on the page were the stories of people who looked like me.
As a person of color, as a woman, as a body moving through this particular space in time, I realize the streets of New York tell the story of resistance, an African-American history of brilliance and beauty that, even in its most brutal moments, did not - could not - kill our resilient and powerful spirit.
Until I was about 13, Manhattan had been a world seen from its edges.
Memory doesn't come as a straight narrative. It comes in small moments with all this white space.
Childhood, young adulthood is fluid. And it's very easy to get labeled very young and have to carry something through your childhood and into your adulthood that is not necessarily who you are.
Readers are hungry to have their stories in the world, to see mirrors of themselves if the stories are about people like them, and to have windows if the stories are about people who have been historically absent in literature.
I don't want anyone to walk through the world feeling invisible ever again.
Friendship is such an important thing to me, and I feel like the people who I love and help keep me whole - I can't imagine a life without them.
I love playing with form. I love playing with sounds... I love music, and I love writing that has a musicality to it.
I've wanted to be a writer since I was seven, but I didn't grow up in family where people aspired to live as writers.
Being a Witness was too closed an experience. That's what I walked away from, not the things I believe.
The hardest part is telling one's story. Once the story is on the page, the rest will come.
I'm inspired by questions I have that I try to figure out the answers to through my writing.
There was something about telling the lie-story and seeing your friends' eyes grow wide with wonder. Of course I got in trouble for lying, but I didn't stop until fifth grade.
I write for whoever needs to read it.
My kids speak of both subtle slights and blatant racism. It's a narrative I never imagined for them.
I would have written 'Brown Girl Dreaming' if no one had ever wanted to buy it, if it went nowhere but inside a desk drawer that my own children pulled out one day to find a tool for survival, a symbol of how strong we are and how much we've come through.
As a child in South Carolina, I spent summers like so many children - sitting on my grandparents' back porch with my siblings, spitting watermelon seeds into the garden or, even worse, swallowing them and trembling as my older brother and sister spoke of the vine that was probably already growing in my belly.
My mother was a single mom whose days were spent as a customer service rep at Con Edison in downtown Brooklyn.
