CANR
WORK TITLE:
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.jacquelinewoodson.com/
CITY: Brooklyn
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CANR 324
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born February 12, 1964, in Columbus, OH; daughter of Jack and Mary Ann Woodson; children; Toshi (daughter), Jackson-Leroi.
EDUCATION:Adelphi University, B.A., 1985; attended New School for Social Research (now New School University).
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author. Goddard College, associate faculty member in M.F.A. Writing Program, 1993-95; Eugene Lang College, associate faculty member, 1994; Vermont College, associate faculty member in M.F.A. program, 1996. Writer-in-residence, National Book Foundation, 1995, 1996. Also worked as an editorial assistant and as a drama therapist for runaway children in New York, NY.
AWARDS:MacDowell Colony fellowship, 1990, 1994; Provincetown, MA, Fine Arts Work Center fellow, 1991-92; Kenyon Review Award for Literary Excellence in Fiction, 1992, 1995; Best Books for Young Adults designation, American Library Association (ALA), 1993, for Maizon at Blue Hill; Jane Addams Children’s Book Award, 1995, 1996; Coretta Scott King Honor Book designation, ALA, 1995, for I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This, and 1996, for From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun; Granta Fifty Best American Authors under Forty inclusion, 1996; Lambda Literary Awards for best fiction and best children’s fiction, 1996; Lambda Literary Award for Children/Young Adult, 1998, for The House You Pass on the Way; ALA Best Book designation; American Film Institute award; Los Angeles Times Book Award for Young-Adult Fiction, and Coretta Scott King Book Award, both 2001, both for Miracle’s Boys; National Book Award nominee in young people’s literature category, Bank Street College Best Children’s Book designation, and Top-Ten Black History Books for Youth listee, Booklist, all 2002, all for Hush; Top Ten Black History Books for Youth listee, 2002, for The Other Side; National Book Award finalist, Coretta Scott King Honor Book designation, and Boston Globe/Horn Book Award for Fiction, all 2003, and International Reading Association/Children’s Book Council Children’s Choice designation, 2004, all for Locomotion; ALA Notable Book designation, 2004, for Coming on Home Soon; ALA Best Books for Young Adults designation, 2005, for Behind You; Newbery Honor Book selection, 2005, for Show Way, 2007, for Feathers; Margaret A. Edwards Award for Lifetime Achievement, ALA, 2006; ALA Best Books for Young Adults designation, and Newbery Honor Book selection, both 2009, both for After Tupac and D Foster; Boston Globe/Horn Book Award Honor Book selection, 2011, for Pecan Pie Baby; Anne V. Zarrow Award for Young Readers’ Literature, 2012; National Book Award’s Young People’s Literature Award, 2014, Coretta Scott King Award, 2015, Newbery Honor Book, 2015, and Sibert Honor Book, 2015, all for Brown Girl Dreaming; named Young People’s Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation, 2015; recipient of honorary degree from Adelphi University, 2016; chosen to deliver the 2017 May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture, 2016; Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, 2018; Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, 2018; Hans Christian Anderson Award, 2020.
WRITINGS
Contributor to anthologies Am I Blue?, edited by Marion Dane Bauer, HarperTrophy (New York, NY), 1994; Girls Got Game, edited by Sue Macy, Holt (New York, NY), 2001; Sixteen: Stories about That Sweet and Bitter Birthday, edited by Megan McCafferty, Three Rivers Press, 2004; 21 Proms, edited by David Levithan and Daniel Ehrenhaft, Scholastic (New York, NY), 2007; Such a Pretty Face: Short Stories about Beauty, edited by Ann Angel, Amulet Books (New York, NY), 2007; No Such Thing as the Real World: Stories about Growing Up and Getting a Life, HarperTeen (New York, NY), 2009; and How Beautiful the Ordinary: Twelve Stories of Identity, edited by Michael Cart, HarperTeen, 2009. Contributor to periodicals, including American Identities, American Voice, Common Lives Quarterly, Conditions, Essence, Horn Book, Kenyon Review, and Out/Look. Member of editorial board, Portable Lower East Side/Queer City.
Miracle’s Boys was adapted as a six-part cable television miniseries for The N network (now Teen Nick), with two episodes directed by Spike Lee, 2005. Many of Woodson’s novels have been adapted for audiocassette, including I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This, Recorded Books, 1999; Lena, Recorded Books, 1999; Miracle’s Boys, Listening Library, 2001; and Locomotion, Recorded Books, 2003; Beneath a Meth Moon is being adapted for a feature film by Jonathan Demme.
SIDELIGHTS
A celebrated author of books for children and teens, Jacqueline Woodson writes about “invisible” people: young girls, minorities, homosexuals, the poor, all the individuals who, many feel, are ignored or forgotten in mainstream America. An African American and a lesbian, Woodson knows firsthand what it is like to be labeled, classified, stereotyped, and pushed aside. In award-winning novels such as I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This, Hush, and After Tupac and D Foster, she strives to celebrate people’s differences, offering her readers messages of hope. “I approach the writing of every one of my books knowing that young people are very resilient,” the author explained to Sally Lodge in a Publishers Weekly interview. “On our livelong journey, things are going to change, and we have to change with them. I think it’s important for young people to know what the world is, in all of its wonder and despair. Having hope allows us to move through it all.”
In a New York Times Online interview, Woodson remarked on her childhood reading habits: “I was a slow reader who was always either reading or writing. Like now, I would read the stories and poems I loved over and over until I’d pretty much memorized them. Even today, I have a lot of my work memorized and usually don’t have to carry my books with me when I do readings. It’s a cool skill to have. Judy Blume was a go-to for me. I also loved Virginia Hamilton and Mildred Taylor. … I love watching my children rediscover the books I loved. Anything by Louise Fitzhugh was a must for my sister and me.” In a further interview with Hope Wabuke on Root Web site, Woodson commented on her youthful decision to become a writer: “I have known I wanted to be a writer since I was seven. I loved telling stories. I loved the physical act of writing. I loved being able to sit down and create something either out of my own experiences or something that was completely made up. The first thing I wrote was a collection of poems about butterflies. I wrote them on little pieces of paper and stapled them together. And then my grandmother washed my pants and they were gone.” In American Libraries, Woodson further commented on what attracts her to writing for young people: “I’ve heard people say that one tends to write from the point of view they’re stuck in. For me, it’s those years between around 6-15 where I have the most memory and can access events and feelings. … Childhood was/is an amazing time, and being able to go back and be there again feels like the greatest gift one could be given. When I write for young people, I feel as though I’ve been graced with this gift.”
Last Summer with Maizon
Woodson’s first book, Last Summer with Maizon, begins a trilogy about friends Margaret and Maizon. Set in the author’s hometown of Brooklyn, New York, the story introduces two eleven-year-olds who are the closest of friends. Their relationship is strained, however, when Margaret’s father dies of a heart attack and Maizon goes to boarding school on a scholarship. While her friend is away, Margaret—who is the quieter of the two—discovers that she has a talent for writing. Maizon, meanwhile, finds that she does not like the almost all-white Connecticut boarding school and returns home to her loved ones.
Critics praised Last Summer with Maizon for its touching portrayal of two close friends and for its convincing sense of place. Horn Book critic Rudine Sims Bishop commented on the story’s “blurred focus,” but asserted that Last Summer with Maizon “is appealing in its vivid portrayal of the characters and the small community they create.”
Maizon at Blue Hill and Between Madison and Palmetto
Woodson continues the story of Margaret and Maizon in Maizon at Blue Hill and Between Madison and Palmetto. The former is not really a sequel but an “equal” to the first book in the trilogy and focuses on what happens to Maizon during her months at the Connecticut boarding school. An intelligent preteen, she enjoys the academic side of Blue Hill, but she is worried about fitting in socially. Most of the other girls are white and are either snobbish or not eager to accept her as a friend. Although she is welcomed by a small clique of other black students, Maizon sees this group as rather elitist, too, and she must ultimately decide whether to continue at the school or return to Brooklyn.
An American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults selection, Maizon at Blue Hill was acclaimed for its strong and appealing characters. “More sharply written than its predecessor, this novel contains some acute characterization,” remarked Sutton his review of Woodson’s novel in the Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books.
The final book in the trilogy, Between Madison and Palmetto, picks up where the first book leaves off, with Maizon and Margaret entering eighth grade at the academy. Again, Woodson covers a lot of ground in just over one hundred pages, including Margaret’s bout with bulimia, issues of integration as the two girls’ neighborhood begins to change and white families move in, and the testing of Margaret and Maizon’s friendship as Maizon spends more time with a new friend named Carolyn. A Publishers Weekly reviewer applauded Woodson’s gift for characterization, and a Kirkus Reviews critic described Between Madison and Palmetto as a fine portrayal of a “close-knit community … [that] comes nicely to life.”
The Dear One and I Hadn't Meant to Tell You This
The central character of The Dear One is twelve-year-old Feni, whose name means “The Dear One” in Swahili. Feni lives in an upper-class, African American home where she basks in her family’s attention. This all changes, however, when fifteen-year-old Rebecca is invited by Feni’s mother to stay with them. Rebecca, the daughter of an old college friend, is a troubled, pregnant teenager from Harlem. Although Feni becomes jealous because she is no longer the center of attention, “gradually and believably, with the patient support of Feni’s mother and a lesbian couple who are long-standing family friends, the two girls begin to develop mutual trust and, finally, a redemptive friendship,” related Twentieth-Century Children’s Writers contributor Michael Cart.
I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This explores a relationship that spans both race and class when Marie, a girl from a well-to-do black family, befriends Lena, whom Marie’s father considers to be “white trash.” Both girls have problems: Marie’s mother has abandoned her family, and Lena is the victim of her father’s sexual molestations. Told from Marie’s point of view, the book details the twelve-year-old’s internal conflicts as she attempts to help her new friend and ultimately must deal with the story’s tragic outcome. “Woodson’s refusal to impose a facile resolution on this heartbreaking dilemma is one of her singular strengths as a writer,” concluded Cart. I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This “is wrenchingly honest and, despite its sad themes, full of hope and inspiration,” concluded a Publishers Weekly reviewer.
Lena
Lena, a sequel to I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This, is narrated from the point of view of Marie’s poor white friend. The novel follows Lena and her little sister, Dion, as they run away from their father and his sexual abuse, keeping themselves safe from predators by disguising themselves as boys. Intending to hitchhike to the birthplace of their dead mother, the sisters face the initial obstacle of the cold of winter, but along the way they meet some friendly people who help and encourage them.
Deborah Stevenson, writing in the Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, described Lena as “a tender and loving story of … encountering much goodness in the world as well as ultimately finding a place to belong in it.”
From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun and The House You Pass on the Way
The issue of homosexuality is addressed in the novels From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun and The House You Pass on the Way. Thirteen-year-old Melanin Sun, the central character in the former novel, has a close relationship with his single working mom, a woman who is also putting herself through law school. Their bond is strained, however, when the teen’s mother reveals that she is a lesbian and that she is in love with a white woman. Torn between his emotional need for his mother and his fear about what her lesbianism implies, Melanin also experiences a tough time as gossip in the neighborhood spreads and the boy’s friends start to abandon him.
Lois Metzger, reviewing the novel in the New York Times Book Review, called From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun a “moving, lovely book,” while Hazel S. Moore asserted in Voice of Youth Advocates that, in the novel, “Woodson has addressed with care and skill the sensitive issue of homosexuality within the family … [without] becoming an advocate of any particular attitude.”
In The House You Pass on the Way, fourteen-year-old Evangeline, the middle child in a mixed-race family, struggles with feelings of guilt and dismay over her awakening sexual orientation. In Woodson’s story, “a provocative topic [is] treated with wisdom and sensitivity,” noted a Kirkus Reviews critic, “with a strong secondary thread exploring some of the inner and outer effects of biracialism.”
Miracle's Boys
The plight of three orphaned brothers in New York City is presented in Woodson’s Coretta Scott King Award-winning novel Miracle’s Boys. Lafayette (or Laff as he is called), the youngest of the three siblings, narrates events “in a voice that’s funny, smart, and troubled,” according to Hazel Rochman in Booklist. Ty’ree, the oldest brother, has given up his educational opportunities to raise his younger brothers, but the teen faces conflict at every turn from middle brother Charlie, a gang member who has just returned from a correctional institution after robbing a candy story. The boys’ relationship is also haunted by the memory of their dead mother, Milagro, and Charlie blames Laff for her death.
A contributor to Horn Book praised Lafayette’s narrative voice, noting that it “maintains a tone of sweet melancholy that is likely to hold the attention of thoughtful young teens.” Edward Sullivan, writing in School Library Journal, found Woodson’s “story of tough, self-sufficient young men to be powerful and engaging.”
Locomotion and Peace, Locomotion
Woodson focuses on a different kind of coming of age in Locomotion, a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Here readers meet eleven-year-old Lonnie Collins Motion, a boy who is known to his friends by the titular nickname, the title of a popular song from the 1960s. Four years ago, Lonnie’s life changed forever when his parents were killed in a fire. Since then he and his sister Lily have been living in foster care, where life is unstable. Now, through the influence of his caring fifth-grade teacher, Lonnie’s life changes for the better when he discovers the power of self-expression through poetry. A novel that features a variety of verse forms, from free verse to haiku to sonnets, Locomotion was described by Horn Book contributor Jennifer M. Brabander as a “finely crafted story of heartbreak and hope” in which the author’s “accessible … narrative will attract readers.” “Count on … Woodson … to present readers with a moving, lyrical, and completely convincing novel in verse,” concluded a Kirkus Reviews writer of Locomotion .
When readers rejoin Woodson’s characters in Peace, Locomotion, a sequel, Lonnie is a year older and still living in a different foster home than Lily. Worried that she will forget their former life together, he writes her letters about everything going on in his life. He tells her of his love of writing, how he is adjusting to a new family, and how concerned he is about a foster brother fighting overseas in an unnamed war. “Woodson again captures the hearts of younger readers—and much older reviewers—through poetry and prose, masterfully juxtaposing sadness and loss with hope and optimism,” Domina Daughtry remarked in the Voice of Youth Advocates. In Horn Book, Brabander once again found Lonnie’s writing believable and added “that his yearning for peace—for himself and his sister, for his foster family, for the world—comes across so subtly yet so powerfully is a testament to Woodson’s strength as a writer.” “Moving, thought-provoking, and brilliantly executed,” Faith Brautigam concluded in School Library Journal, Peace, Locomotion “is the rare sequel that lives up to the promise of its predecessor.”
Hush and If You Come Softly
Hush centers on Toswiah Green, the young daughter of a black police officer. When her father chooses to testify against fellow policemen—white law enforcement officials whom he witnessed shooting and killing an unarmed black teen—Toswiah’s life is turned upside down. The white community and his fellow police officers turn against Green, and the family must enter the witness protection program, move to another state, and assume new identities. Racism, self-identity, the class system, and ethical imperatives are among the themes dealt with in the journal that Toswiah keeps, writing under her new name, Evie Thomas. “Woodson shows that while Evie’s situation is extreme, everyone has to leave home and come to terms with many shifting identities,” commented Rochman in a Booklist review. Jennifer M. Brabander, reviewing Hush in Horn Book, also lauded the story, concluding that Woodson’s “poetic, low-key, yet vivid writing style perfectly conveys the story’s atmosphere of quiet intensity.”
If You Come Softly is a “meditative interracial love story with a wrenching climatic twist,” according to a critic for Kirkus Reviews. The star-crossed lovers in this tale are Jeremiah (or Miah) and Ellie, a black boy and a white girl who fall in love while attending the same private school. Although they successfully bridge the gulf between their families, when Miah forgets his father’s warning and runs through a park in a white neighborhood, he is shot by police. “As in all of her fiction, Woodson confronts prejudice head-on,” wrote Rochman of the book, and School Library Journal contributor Tom S. Hurlburt described If You Come Softly as “a novel that will ring true with young adults as it makes subtle comments on social situations.”
Behind You and After Tupac and D Foster
The violence that is commonplace to children living in the inner city is the focus of Woodson’s novels Behind You and After Tupac and D Foster. A sequel to If You Come Softly, Behind You lets readers reunite with fifteen-year-old Miah. The meeting is an unusual one, however, as Miah is now a ghost, having been mistakenly killed by police in a tragic shooting at the close of the previous novel. In alternating narratives, Miah and Ellie now describe events in the aftermath of the shooting, illuminating the effect of the tragedy on their grief-stricken family members and friends. Behind You “is strewn with poignant emblems of the narrators’ grief,” according to Horn Book contributor Christine M. Heppermann, the critic concluding that “Woodson deftly uses her story as an opportunity for social commentary.”
Three close friends measure the passage of time in their short lives by the well-publicized shooting and death of rap singer Tupac Shakur in After Tupac and D Foster. The years 1994 to 1996 mark a magical but too-short time in the lives of eleven-year-olds Neeka, D Foster, and the story’s narrator. Living in Queens, New York, the girls become close in 1994, after D, a free-spirited foster child, meets the other two girls. With news that Tupac has been shot, the three friends join others in exploring the singer’s music, and Tupac’s lyrics about racial inequality. Through D, as well as through these lyrics, Neeka and the narrator learn about life on the streets and their world broadens. Praising the story for its “subtle details, authentic language, and rich [character] development,” Engberg deemed After Tupac and D Foster “a memorable, affecting novel about the sustaining power of love and friendship.”
Feathers and Beneath a Meth Moon
Threaded with music of a different sort—in this case the poetry of Emily Dickinson—Woodson’s Newbery Honor award-winning Feathers takes place in 1971, during the Vietnam War. A bright student, Frannie finds her imagination captured by Dickinson’s verse, as well as by a new student in her class of mostly black students: the white, long-haired boy derogatorily nicknamed Jesus Boy. Because of Jesus Boy’s pacifist nature, Frannie and friend Samantha begin to wonder whether the nickname might not hint at a reality, because their unstable world seems to be in need of a savior. Discussing Frannie, Maria D. LaRocco observed in School Library Journal that Woodson exhibits “her usual talent for creating characters who confront, reflect, and grow into their own persons.” Feathers “raises important questions about God, racial segregation and issues surrounding the hearing-impaired with a light and thoughtful touch,” wrote a Publishers Weekly contributor, and Rochman described the work as a “small, fast-moving novel that introduces big issues—faith, class, color, … disability, and friendship.”
In Beneath a Meth Moon, “Woodson takes us on the dark journey of addiction, mimicking the slow, hazy spell of drug use with the lull of her poetic prose,” according to Horn Book critic Lauren Adams. After losing her mother and grandmother in Hurricane Katrina, fifteen-year-old Laurel attempts to rebuild her life in the small town of Galilee, Iowa. Although Laurel meets a host of new friends and joins the cheerleading squad, she also falls for T-Boom, her school’s star basketball player, who introduces the teen to the powerful stimulant methamphetamine. “Woodson crafts a story of powerful emotional intensity through her poignant portrayal of a young woman lost and in pain,” a writer in Kirkus Reviews observed of Beneath a Meth Moon .
The Other Side, Sweet, Sweet Memory, and Our Gracie Aunt
Although most of her works have been aimed at preteen and teenage audiences, Woodson has also written a number of picture books that examine themes similar to those she explores in her works for older readers. In The Other Side, which features evocative artwork by E.B. Lewis, she examines the racial divide in the United States via two girls, one white and one black, who slowly get to know one another as they sit on the fence that separates their neighborhoods. In Booklist, Rochman addressed the poetic aspect of the picture book, commenting that “even young children will understand the fence metaphor and they will enjoy the quiet friendship drama.”
In Sweet, Sweet Memory, Woodson deals with the death of a beloved grandparent. At first deeply saddened by the passing of her grandfather, a little girl slowly eases her pain with fond, funny memories that make her laugh. Booklist contributor Ilene Cooper noted that Woodson’s “elegant text” is enhanced by Floyd Cooper’s artwork, creating a book that will “resonate with those who have lost someone dear.” Another picture book, Our Gracie Aunt, presents readers with what a Publishers Weekly critic dubbed an “affecting story” about a little boy and girl who are cared for by their loving aunt while their mother recuperates in the hospital. The same reviewer concluded that the “rosy qualities of this tale do not impair its emotional truth.”
Coming on Home Soon
Set during World War II, Coming on Home Soon concerns a girl whose life is disrupted when her father joins the military and her mother must journey north to find work. Mary N. Oluonye deemed Coming on Home Soon a “tender, heart-felt story that will touch readers” in her School Library Journal review. Sibling rivalry is the focus of Pecan Pie Baby, which focuses on young Gia’s anxiety over the arrival of her new baby sister. “Woodson infuses Gia’s primal child-voice with an authorial lyricism that permits some lovely, lucid introspection,” explained a writer in Kirkus Reviews.
Woodson has garnered a host of honors for her works, including the Margaret A. Edwards Award for her contributions to young-adult literature. Still, she remains humble about her achievements, remarking to School Library Journal interviewer Deborah Taylor: “It still feels like I’m at the beginning, and I have a lot of work to do and a lot of stories to tell. It feels very surreal that out there somewhere there are people saying, ‘Wow, she’s done some amazing stuff.’ And, you know, it feels wonderful. It feels like I haven’t done this work in vain.”
Each Kindness and This Is the Rope
Woodson’s 2012 title, Each Kindness, centers on impoverished Maya, who attends a new school and has a hard time fitting in. One day Maya is missing, and the most popular of her rejecters, Chloe, notices that Maya has disappeared from the classroom. Chloe realizes that her chance at being kind to the girl has past, learning a tough lesson about spreading kindness to all.
In 2013, Woodson published This Is the Rope: A Story from the Great Migration, begins with a little girl in South Carolina finding a rope tree one summer afternoon. Unbeknownst to her, the rope will become an important part of her family’s history. For three generations the rope is passed down and used for things as simple as jumping rope and tying suitcases, but the story is one about the Great Migration, so the rope is also used to move the girl’s family to New York City. Eventually, the rope is used for a family reunion where the little girl has grown into a grandmother. Overall, the book was well-received by critics. Robbin Friedman, writing in School Library Journal, felt that Woodson “provided a pleasing portrait of one loving family in the midst of a movement.”
Brown Girl Dreaming
Woodson’s 2014 novel in verse, Brown Girl Dreaming, won the National Book Award of Young Adult Literature and the Coretta Scott King Award, and it was selected as a Newbery Honor Book and a Sibert Honor Book. The book is a collection of vignettes from Woodson’s own girlhood that range in subject matter from segregation in the South to her early writing experiences. Brown Girl Dreaming received overwhelming praise. A contributor to the New York Times stated that the book could be read “in one sitting, but it is as rich a spread as the potluck table at a family reunion. Sure, you can plow through the pages, grabbing everything you can in one go, like piling a plate high with fried chicken and ribs, potato salad and corn bread. And yes, it’s entirely possible to hold that plate with one hand while balancing a bowl of gumbo and a cup of sweet tea with the other. But since the food isn’t going anywhere, you’ll make out just as well, maybe even a little better, if you pace yourself.”
A Book Smugglers website contributor noted: “ Brown Girl Dreaming is an excellent book on its own and as an exceedingly moving memoir. That said, its importance as a book aimed at children cannot be underestimated either for everything that it is: a brown girl dreaming. Every single part of that sentence—brown girl dreaming—is vital.”
Another Brooklyn
Woodson writes for an adult audience in her 2016 novel, Another Brooklyn, the story of young August and her three best friends—Sylvia, Gigi, and Angela—as they grow up in Brooklyn in the 1970s. As an adult, August is an anthropologist who returns to her old neighborhood for the funeral of her father. She runs into her old friend Sylvia on the subway, and without wanting to, she is drawn back into childhood memories with her trio of friends. Via flashbacks, the reader learns of the arrival of August and her motherless family in Brooklyn from rural Tennessee in 1973, her subsequent bonding with the three other girls, and her ascent into womanhood. Converted to Islam, August still mourns her absent mother as she grows into sexual maturity. Ultimately, tragic circumstances pull the four girls apart. Woodson sets her novel in Brooklyn and dedicates it to the Bushwick neighborhood. In a Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross excerpted at NPR Online, Woodson described this neighborhood where she grew up: “I came to Bushwick in the late ’60s, and it was a changing neighborhood. It was on the edge of white flight, so the white families were moving to places like Long Island and Queens and wherever white folks moved back then. And it was becoming a neighborhood that was predominately black and Latino and a neighborhood of strivers, people who had come from other places through the Great Migration or through immigration itself and—to build a better opportunity for their families. So it was very alive. It was—my memory of it was this beautiful, kind of heartfelt vibrancy of a place.”
Another Brooklyn received critical praise from many reviewers. Writing in the Los Angeles Times Online, Nichole Perkins commented: “ Another Brooklyn joins the tradition of studying female friendships and the families we create when our own isn’t enough. … Woodson uses her expertise at portraying the lives of children to explore the power of memory, death and friendship. Even when what was good turns sour, it can fuel the rest of our lives, in ways we never think to acknowledge.” Similarly, New York Times Book Review contributor Tayari Jones noted of this “haunting” novel: “Woodson brings the reader so close to her young characters that you can smell the bubble gum on their breath and feel their lips as they brush against your ear. This is both the triumph and challenge of this powerfully insightful novel. ‘This is memory,’ we are reminded. But this is also the here and now. There is no time to take a few paces back and enjoy the comforts of hindsight. The present, we are repeatedly reminded, is no balm for the wounds of the past.” USA Today reviewer Mark Athiakis was also impressed, observing: “Woodson … writes with a consistent warmth and compassion. August contemplates her teen years from the distance of adulthood, so we know she survived. But Woodson keenly understands how hard feelings linger: ‘When you’re fifteen, pain skips over reason, aims right for marrow,’ August observes. Another Brooklyn captures the intensity of that pain—and the complex, aching nostalgia it can inspire.” In the Washington Post Online, Ron Charles likewise wrote: “ Another Brooklyn is a short but complex story that arises from simmering grief. It lulls across the pages like a mournful whisper. … The real attraction of this novel … [is that it] mixes wonder and grief so poignantly. Woodson manages to remember what cannot be documented, to suggest what cannot be said. Another Brooklyn is another name for poetry.” Christian Science Monitor critic Jenny Sawyer had a similar assessment, noting: “ Another Brooklyn is a melancholy book, but also lovely. And while it deals with tragedies, it isn’t tragic. As in Woodson’s other novels, the act of making it through the teen years is a triumph, a miracle. August’s story manages to celebrate this coming of age even as it remains haunted by the what-ifs and what-could-have-beens of an all-too-recognizable past.” Still higher praise came from a Kirkus Reviews contributor who termed the novel a “stunning achievement from one of the quietly great masters of our time.”
(open new) The Day You Beginand Harbor Me
Woodson teams with illustrator Rafael Lopez on the 2018 picture book, The Day You Begin. The author and illustrator take young children into situations in which they might feel different and uncomfortable because of where they come from, the language they speak natively, the color of their skin, or what foods they might eat. The text reminds us that we all feel different at times, outsiders. But it is important to be brave enough to go forward, take the first steps to reach out and share our stories. Sometimes, this effort will be met halfway by others who want to share their stories too. “Woodson’s gentle, lilting story and Lopez’s artistry create a stirring portrait of the courage it takes to be oneself,” noted a Publishers Weekly reviewer. Similarly, a Kirkus Reviews critic concluded: “This reassuring, lyrical book feels like a big hug from a wise aunt as she imparts the wisdom of the world in order to calm trepidatious young children. … A must-have book about the power of one’s voice and the friendships that emerge when you are yourself.”
In Harbor Me, Woodson “celebrates all that is essential and good for humanity–compassion, understanding, security, and freedom–in [a] touching novel about six children with special needs,” according to a Publishers Weekly reviewer. These children are sixth graders who do not know much about each other. On Friday afternoons, their teacher takes them to ARTT (a room to talk), where they are free to talk to one another without any adult supervision. Haley and her best friend Holly slowly get to know their four male classmates and learn about their dreams and problems. Esteban, who is of Dominican heritage, tells of his father’s deportation by ICE; Amari fears racial profiling; Ashton, a white boy, needs to deal with his family’s new economic situation. Others are dealing with grief and loss, and Haley is the last to tell the story of her mother’s death and the reason her father is in prison. The Publishers Weekly reviewer further commented: “Showing how America’s political and social issues affect children on a daily basis, this novel will leave an indelible mark on readers’ minds.” Writing in Horn Book, Monique Harris felt this novel “will speak to young people’s insecurities and fears while recognizing their courage in facing them.” Harris added: “A timely tribute to the resilience of young people and to the power of human connection that often overrides our differences.” Likewise, a Kirkus Reviews critic concluded: “This story, told with exquisite language and clarity of narrative, is both heartbreaking and hopeful. An extraordinary and timely piece of writing.”
Red at the Bone
Woodson turns again to fiction for adults in her 2019 work, Red at the Bone, which explores the ways in which two families are fundamentally changed by an unplanned pregnancy. The novel opens in 2001 at a coming-of-age party for sixteen-year-old Melody. The party is at her grandparents’ brownstone with the music of Prince playing and Melody is wearing the dress specially made for her own mother sixteen years ago for another coming-of-age celebration that never took place. The novel moves backwards and forwards in time from this opening, with Melody’s unmarried parents, Iris and Aubrey, in attendance, as well as maternal grandparents, Sabe and Sammy “Po Boy” Simmons. These various characters take the reader into the history of the families in flashbacks. Sabe was well-educated but still remembers the losses her family suffered in the race massacre in Tulsa in 1921. When she learned her fifteen-year-old daughter Iris was pregnant, she was filled with both shame and anger. Then it became clear that Iris did not want to marry Aubrey, a mail-room clerk. Instead, after giving birth to Melody, she went to college, leaving the child in the care of Aubrey and her parents. Even after moving back to New York and a Manhattan apartment, Iris invited her daughter for visits but not to live with her. This tenuous relationship is strained even further when Melody decides to wear the dress intended for Iris’s coming-of-age party.
Red at the Bone earned praise from many reviewers. A Publishers Weekly writer commented: “Woodson’s nuanced voice evokes the complexities of race, class, religion, and sexuality in fluid prose and a series of telling details. This is a wise, powerful, and compassionate novel.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor was also impressed, noting, “In Woodson, at the height of her powers, readers hear the blues: ‘beneath that joy, such a sadness.'” Similarly, BookPage reviewer Lauren Bufferd felt “this lyrical, lightly told coming-of-age story is bound to satisfy.” Women’s Review of Books critic LaToya Council likewise remarked: “Red at the Bone is a novel packed with layers, and adds to the canon of literature that highlights an accurate account of Black family life. … These beautiful pages illuminate how race and class are experienced in gendered, patterned ways for Black women and men. In short, Woodson produces knowledge about Black Americans that pays homage to family history, historical context, and intersectionality–forms of analyses that mark a writer worthy of Black feminist theorizing.” Writing in the Guardian Online, Regina Porter observed: “Woodson’s haunting novel, a 16-year-old girl’s coming-of-age party prompts an avalanche of memories for her middle-class African American family. … There is an abundance of angst over class, gender and race subtly woven into this beguilingly slim novel.” Further praise came from NPR contributor Heller McAlpin, who dubbed the novel an “exquisitely wrought tale of two urban black families.” McAlpin added: “Red at the Bone should win Woodson plenty of new fans. It reads like poetry and drama, a cry from the heart that often cuts close to the bone. The narrative nimbly jumps around in time and shifts points of view among five characters who span three generations.” (close new)
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Children’s Literature Review, Volume 49, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1998.
Gay and Lesbian Literature, Volume 2, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1998.
St. James Guide to Young-Adult Writers, 2nd edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999.
Twentieth-Century Children’s Writers, 4th edition, edited by Laura Standley Berger, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1995.
PERIODICALS
All Things Considered, August 10, 2016, “Jacqueline Woodson’s New Novel for Adults Has Its Roots in Adolescence.”
American Libraries, March-April, 2015, “Newsmaker: Jacqueline Woodson,” p. 23.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Atlanta, GA), August 24, 2016, Shelia M.Poole, review of Another Brooklyn, p. D1.
AudioFile, October-November, 2016, Susie Wilde, review of Another Brooklyn, p. 31.
Black Issues Book Review, May, 2001, Samiya A. Bashir, “Tough Issues, Tender Minds,” p. 78; March-April, 2002, Lynda Jones, review of Hush, p. 67.
Booklist, October 1, 1998, Hazel Rochman, review of If You Come Softly, p. 326; February 1, 1999, Hazel Rochman, review of Lena, p. 970; February 15, 2000, Hazel Rochman, review of Miracle’s Boys, p. 1102; January 1, 2002, Hazel Rochman, review of Hush, p. 851; February 15, 2004, Gillian Engberg, review of Behind You, p. 1073; August, 2004, Hazel Rochman, review of Coming on Home Soon, p. 1925; February 1, 2005, Hazel Rochman, interview with Woodson, p. 968; September 15, 2005, Hazel Rochman, review of Show Way, p. 63; November 15, 2006, Hazel Rochman, review of Feathers, p. 49; February 1, 2008, Gillian Engberg, review of After Tupac and D Foster, p. 51; August 1, 2010, Hazel Rochman, review of Pecan Pie Baby, p. 61; December 15, 2011, Ann Kelley, review of Beneath a Meth Moon, p. 53; August 1, 2012, Hazel Rochman, review of Each Kindness, p. 66; June 1, 2013, Carolyn Phelan, review of This Is the Rope: A Story from the Great Migration, p. 111; August 1, 2014, Michael Cart, review of Brown Girl Dreaming, p. 60; April 1, 2016, Sylvia M. Vardell, “Talking with Jacqueline Woodson: The Award-Winning Author Discusses the Powerful Effects That Poetry, in Various Formats, Can Have on Young Readers,” p. S10; May 15, 2016, Annie Bostrom, review of Another Brooklyn, p. 19.
BookPage, August, 2016, Tom Deignan, review of Another Brooklyn, p. 24; September, 2019, Lauren Bufferd, review of review of Red at the Bone, p. 20.
Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, October, 1990, Roger Sutton, review of Last Summer with Maizon, pp. 49-50; December, 1992, Roger Sutton, review of Maizon at Blue Hill, p. 128; April, 1999, Deborah Stevenson, review of Lena, p. 298; May, 2001, Janice M. Del Negro, review of Sweet, Sweet Memory, p. 357; March, 2002, review of Hush, p. 262; March, 2003, review of Locomotion, p. 294; February, 2005, Deborah Stevenson, review of Coming on Home Soon, p. 272.
Christian Century, September 28, 2016, review of Another Brooklyn, p. 41.
Christian Science Monitor, August 15, 2016, Jenny Sawyer, review of Another Brooklyn.
Horn Book, September, 1992, Rudine Sims Bishop, review of Last Summer with Maizon, pp. 616-620; November-December, 1995, Jacqueline Woodson, “A Sign of Having Been Here,” pp. 711-715; March-April, 2000, review of Miracle’s Boys, p. 203; January-February, 2002, Jennifer M. Brabander, review of Hush, p. 87; November-December, 2002, Roger Sutton, review of Visiting Day, p. 743; March-April, 2003, Jennifer M. Brabander, review of Locomotion, p. 219; May-June, 2004, Christine M. Heppermann, review of Behind You, p. 338; November-December, 2005, Joanna Rudge Long, review of Show Way, p. 712; March-April, 2007, Lauren Adams, review of Feathers, p. 206; January-February, 2008, Christine M. Heppermann, review of After Tupac and D Foster, p. 98; January-February, 2009, Jennifer M. Brabander, review of Peace, Locomotion, p. 105; November-December, 2010, Joanna Rudge Long, review of Pecan Pie Baby, p. 82; March-April, 2012, Lauren Adams, review of Beneath a Meth Moon, p. 123; January-February, 2013, Joanna Rudge Long, review of Each Kindness, p. 73; July-August, 2013, Kathleen T. Horning, review of This Is the Rope, p. 118; September-October, 2014, Martha V. Parravano, review of Brown Girl Dreaming, p. 126; November-December, 2018, Monique Harris, review of Harbor Me, p. 94.
Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, May, 2009, Bridgette Stahn, review of After Tupac and D Foster, p. 728.
Kirkus Reviews, December 1, 1993, review of Between Madison and Palmetto, p. 1532; July 1, 1997, review of The House You Pass on the Way, p. 1038; August 15, 1998, review of If You Come Softly, p. 1199; December 1, 2001, review of Hush, p. 169; November 15, 2002, review of Locomotion, p. 1704; September 15, 2005, review of Show Way, p. 1037; February 1, 2007, review of Feathers, p. 131; December 1, 2007, review of After Tupac and D Foster; September 15, 2010, review of Pecan Pie Baby; January 1, 2012, review of Beneath a Meth Moon; September 15, 2012, review of Each Kindness; July 1, 2013, review of This Is the Rope; July 15, 2014, review of Brown Girl Dreaming; June 1, 2016, review of Another Brooklyn; July 1, 2018, review of Harbor Me and The Day You Begin; July 15, 2019, review of review of Red at the Bone.
Kliatt, January, 1999, Paula Rohrlick, review of Lena, pp. 10-11; January, 2002, Claire Rosser, review of Hush, p. 8; March, 2002, Claire Rosser, review of Miracle’s Boys, p. 20; May, 2004, Paula Rohrlick, review of Behind You, p. 15, and Nancy Zachary, review of The Dear One, p. 25; January, 2008, Claire Rosser, review of After Tupac and D Foster, p. 13.
Library Journal, June 15, 2016, Stephanie Sendaula, review of Another Brooklyn, p. 71; December 1, 2016, Terry Hong, review of Another Brooklyn, p. 56.
Marie Claire, August, 2016, Steph Opitz, review of Another Brooklyn, p. 80.
Ms., November-December, 1994, Diane R. Paylor, “Bold Type: Jacqueline Woodson’s ‘Girl Stories,’” p. 77.
New York Times Book Review, February 26, 1995, Catherine Bush, “A World without Childhood,” p. 14; July 16, 1995, Lois Metzger, review of From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun, p. 27; August 22, 2014, review of Brown Girl Dreaming; August 21, 2016, Tayari Jones, review of Another Brooklyn, p. 8.
Publishers Weekly, November 8, 1993, review of Between Madison and Palmetto, p. 78; April 18, 1994, review of I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This, p. 64; June 22, 1998, review of If You Come Softly, p. 92; December 14, 1998, review of Lena, p. 77; April 17, 2000, review of Miracle’s Boys, p. 81; February 11, 2002, Jennifer M. Brown, “From Outsider to Insider,” interview, p. 156; November 25, 2002, review of Locomotion, p. 68; November 17, 2003, review of The House You Pass on the Way, p. 68; September 12, 2005, review of Show Way, p. 67; January 8, 2007, review of Feathers, p. 51; December 10, 2007, review of After Tupac and D Foster, p. 56; September 17, 2010, review of Pecan Pie Baby, p. 59; January 2, 2012, review of Beneath a Meth Moon, p. 86; September 17, 2012, review of Each Kindness, p. 54; May 20, 2013, review of This Is the Rope, p. 58; May 26, 2014, review of Brown Girl Dreaming, p. 63; April 11, 2016, review of Another Brooklyn, p. 35; August 22, 2016, Carolyn Juris, review of Another Brooklyn, p. 14; October 31, 2016, Liz Hartman, “N.Y.C.: Tales of the City—A Reading from Three Novels;” May 21, 2018, review of Harbor Me, p. 74; June 11, 2018, review of The Day You Begin, p. 66; November 27, 2018, review of Harbor Me, p. 46; July 15, 2019, review of review of Red at the Bone, p. 51.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis, MO), October 20, 2016, Jane Henderson, “Literature Gives Kids ‘Other Ways of Seeing the World.’”
School Librarian, November, 1991, Julie Blaisdale, review of Last Summer with Maizon, p. 154.
School Library Journal, December, 1998, Tom S. Hurlburt, review of If You Come Softly, p. 132; May, 2000, Edward Sullivan, review of Miracle’s Boys, p. 178; August, 2001, Jacqueline Woodson, transcript of Coretta Scott King Book Award acceptance speech, p. 57; February, 2002, Sharon Grover, review of Hush, p. 138; January, 2003, Faith Brautigam, review of Locomotion, p. 172; October, 2004, Mary N. Oluonye, reviews of The Other Side, p. 66, and Coming on Home Soon, p. 137; November, 2005, Mary N. Oluonye, review of Show Way, p. 111; June, 2006, Deborah Taylor, “Jacqueline Woodson: This Year’s Edwards Award-Winner Takes on Life’s Toughest Challenges—Poverty and Prejudice, Love and Loss,” p. 42; April, 2007, D. Maria LaRocco, review of Feathers, p. 152; April, 2008, Kelly Vikstrom, review of After Tupac and D Foster, p. 154; January, 2009, Faith Brautigan, review of Peace, Locomotion, p. 124; October, 2010, Mary N. Oluonye, review of Pecan Pie Baby, p. 97; September, 2012, Sara Lissa Paulson, review of Each Kindness, p. 127; July, 2013, Robbin E. Friedman, review of This Is the Rope, p. 75; July, 2014, D. Maria LaRocco, review of Brown Girl Dreaming, p. 126; November, 2016, Suzanne Gordon, review of Another Brooklyn, p. 109.
USA Today, August 9, 2016, Mark Athiakis, review of Another Brooklyn, p. 5B.
Voice of Youth Advocates, October, 1991, Hazel S. Moore, review of The Dear One, p. 236; October, 1992, Alice F. Stern, review of Maizon at Blue Hill, p. 235; June, 1994, Alice F. Stern, review of Between Madison and Palmetto, p. 95; October, 1995, Hazel S. Moore, review of From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun, p. 227; February, 2001, review of Miracle’s Boys, p. 400; February, 2009, Domina Daughtry, review of Peace, Locomotion, p. 536; October, 2014, Deborah L. Dubois, review of Brown Girl Dreaming, p. 77.
Women’s Review of Books, November-December, 2019, LuToya Council, review of Red at the Bone, p. 14.
ONLINE
Amazon, https://www.amazon.com/ (July 14, 2020), “Jacqueline Woodson.”
Book Smugglers, http://thebooksmugglers.com/ (April 18, 2015), review of Brown Girl Dreaming.
Brooklyn, http://www.bkmag.com/ (September 28, 2015), Molly McArdle, “‘I Believe in Brooklyn’: At Home with Jacqueline Woodson.”
Christian Science Monitor Online, http://www.csmonitor.com/ (September 19, 2014), Augusta Scattergood, review of Brown Girl Dreaming.
Fantastic Fiction, https://www.fantasticfiction.com/ (July 14, 2020), “Jacqueline Woodson.”
Jacqueline Woodson website, http://www.jacquelinewoodson.com (January 15, 2017).
Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (January 18, 2020), “Jacqueline Woodson: ‘It’s Important to Know that Whatever Moment We’re In, It’s not the First Time’;” (February 15, 2020), Regina Porter, review of Red at the Bone.
Los Angeles Times Online, http://www.latimes.com/ (August 12, 2016), Nichole Perkins, review of Another Brooklyn.
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (August 25, 2016), “Jacqueline Woodson: By the Book.” (September 19, 2019), Kat Chow, “Jacqueline Woodson Transformed Children’s Literature. Now She’s Writing for Herself.”
NPR Online, http://www.npr.org/ (August 9, 2016), Terry Gross, interview with Woodson; (October 14, 2016), Dave Davies, “Jacqueline Woodson on Growing Up, Coming Out and Saying Hi to Strangers;” (September 17, 2019), Heller McAlpin, review of Red at the Bone.
Poetry Foundation website, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ (July 14, 2020), “Jacqueline Woodson.”
Publishers Weekly Online, http://www.publishersweekly.com/ (January 19, 2012), Sally Lodge, interview with Woodson.
Vogue Online, http://www.vogue.com/ (August 29, 2016), Megan O’Grady, review of Another Brooklyn.
Washington Post Online, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ (August 12, 2016), Ron Charles, review of Another Brooklyn.
Weekend Edition Online, http://www.npr.org/ (August 28, 2016), “Wisdom from YA Authors on Leaving Home: Jacqueline Woodson.”*
I used to say I’d be a teacher or a lawyer or a hairdresser when I grew up but even as I said these things, I knew what made me happiest was writing.
Jacqueline Woodson’s TED Talk “What reading slowly taught me about writing”
I wrote on everything and everywhere. I remember my uncle catching me writing my name in graffiti on the side of a building. (It was not pretty for me when my mother found out.) I wrote on paper bags and my shoes and denim binders. I chalked stories across sidewalks and penciled tiny tales in notebook margins. I loved and still love watching words flower into sentences and sentences blossom into stories.
I also 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! 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.
That year, I wrote a story and my teacher said “This is really good.” Before that I had written a poem about Martin Luther King that was, I guess, so good no one believed I wrote it. After lots of brouhaha, it was believed finally that I had indeed penned the poem which went on to win me a Scrabble game and local acclaim. So by the time the story rolled around and the words “This is really good” came out of the otherwise down-turned lips of my fifth grade teacher, I was well on my way to understanding that a lie on the page was a whole different animal — one that won you prizes and got surly teachers to smile. A lie on the page meant lots of independent time to create your stories and the freedom to sit hunched over the pages of your notebook without people thinking you were strange.
Lots and lots of books later, I am still surprised when I walk into a bookstore and see my name on a book or when the phone rings and someone on the other end is telling me I’ve just won an award. 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.” The way, I — the skinny girl in the back of the classroom who was always getting into trouble for talking or missed homework assignments — sat up a little straighter, folded my hands on the desks, smiled and began to believe in me.
What’s your favorite color?
Used to be blue but now it’s most of the time, green. I like earth tones more than pastels and I love stripes!
What’s your favorite food?
Pizza.
What foods don’t you like?
Well, I’m allergic to avocado and watermelon. I don’t like to eat artichokes, papaya, red meat, alfalfa sprouts, oatmeal, mussels, sea bass,… This list is actually much longer but I’ll stop here.
Do you have brothers and sisters?
I have an older brother named Hope, and an older sister, Odella, and a younger brother, Roman. I’m the only one in my family with a name you’ve really heard before. Except the name “Hope,” but it’s usually given to a girl. My grandfather’s name was Hope. His wife, my paternal grandma, was named Grace. I think that’s pretty cool that their names were Hope & Grace. If you want to know more about them all, read Brown Girl Dreaming.
Oh – Even though I’m five feet ten inches tall, I’m the shortest person in my family.
Where were you born?
Columbus, Ohio but I spent my early life in Greenville, South Carolina. We moved to Brooklyn when I was about seven.
When were you born?
I was born on February 12th, on a Tuesday.
What was your favorite subject in school?
I loved English and anything where we got to write. I was terrible at math and science. I loved gym and Spanish and anything that allowed us to dance or jump around. I wasn’t a big fan of sitting still too long unless I was reading. I always read the same books again and again. I’ve also always read very, very slowly. I still do.
What are/were some of your favorite books?
As a kid, I loved anything by Virginia Hamilton or Judy Blume. I also loved The Selfish Giant by Oscar Wilde and The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Anderson. Oh—and Stevie by Jon Steptoe. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor. And Zeely by Virginia Hamilton. And of course, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume. These days, I feel like my favorites list of books just keeps on growing but I love anything by Jason Reynolds, Kwame Alexander, An Na, Rita Williams-Garcia, Naomi Shihab Nye, and lots and lots of other people.
Do you have any pets?
We have two dogs, one named Toffee and Shadow, and a cat named Fred.
Why do you love writing so much?
Because it makes me happy. Even when the words are slow in coming and the story seems all lopsided, writing keeps me happy.
Where have you traveled?
I’ve been to all fifty states (including Alaska) at least two times and have met some really cool young people in all of them. I’ve been to England, Sweden, Brazil, France, Germany, Spain, Ghana, Morocco, India, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Belize, Virgin Gorda and Mexico. And probably a couple of other places I don’t remember right now.
What languages do you speak?
Mostly English but I also know Spanish and a good bit of American Sign Language. If I am desperate, I can find a bathroom in French and German.
What are some of the other languages your books are published in?
Italian, Dutch, Tagalog, French, Spanish, German, Swedish, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Turkish, and a few others I don’t remember right now.
Is writing hard?
Yes. Anything you do that you want to do well can be difficult at times. Revising is hard. Thinking of new things to write about is hard. And the difficulty makes it that much more rewarding.
Are any of your books based on your life?
The only ones that have some autobiographical content are Brown Girl Dreaming, Visiting Day, Sweet, Sweet Memory, Show Way and all the Maizon books.
Do you ever get Writer’s Block?
Nope. There’s no such thing. I think it’s just your mind telling you that the thing you’re writing isn’t the thing you really want to be writing. If this happens to me, I start writing something else. I’m usually working on more than one book at a time. When the ideas stop coming for one, I move on to another one.
Do you have any kids?
I have a daughter named Toshi and a son named Jackson Leroi. They both love to fence. JL is also a really great musician. He plays the drums and the piano. Toshi was named after her Godmom, Toshi Reagon who is a really cool singer. Jackson Leroi was named after me kinda. My dad is Jack. I’m Jacqueline and he’s Jackson Leroi. The Leroi part came because we just love that name.
What music do you listen to?
Here are some of the people on my computer: Toshi Reagon, Joni Mitchell, Tierra Whack, J Cole, Childish Gambino, Talib Kweli, Bruce Springstein, The Black Eyed Peas, Nas, the Indigo Girls, ani difranco, Eminem, Lauren Hill, Ke$ha, and the whole Free To Be You and Me soundtrack. Although, the music list changes often.
How many books do you work on at one time?
I’m usually working on two or three books at once.
Where do you write?
I have a writing room in my house in Brooklyn. Sometimes, I sit on the stoop or write at Prospect Park. Sometimes, if an idea starts coming, I just write wherever I am and on whatever I have.
Of all the books you’ve written, do you have a favorite?
Nope. I like each of them for different reasons. Sometimes, long after I’ve finished a book, I’m still thinking about the people in it.
If you couldn’t write, what would you do?
Play for the NBA—Try to make those Knicks a winning team!
Do you think you’ll ever stop writing?
When I stop breathing.
Fun Facts About Me
I can only write with my notebook turned sideways. When I was a kid, I wrote with it turned upside down.
I write, catch, and eat with my right hand. Everything else – batting, shooting a basket, holding a golf club, etc. is done with my left.
I can shake my eyeballs in bright light.
I have a long, long list of foods I don’t like. (I guess this isn’t really a ‘fun’ fact!)
I am very, very neat. Except when I am not.
I know the lyrics to about a thousand bad songs from the 1970s, including songs from tv commercials and television shows.
I have a lot of my writing memorized so that I don’t have to carry my books everywhere.
I once wrote a book in two weeks and it only needed a little revision.
The next book I wrote took four years.
I have only lost at checkers once or twice. I have only won at Chess once.
I can jump double-dutch.
Even though I can walk to a Brooklyn Nets game from my house, I’m still a die-hard Knicks fan.
I love it when it’s quiet and sunny.
Fall is my favorite season.
My son was born in the United States but since then, has never spent a birthday in this country. (His birthday is February 19th which is usually Winter Break.)
I share a birthday with Abraham Lincoln and Judy Blume.
I laugh at really dumb jokes.
Something many people don’t know about me:alagaAdv3
When I was a toddler, I did a series of advertisements for Alaga Syrup in Ebony Magazine. Even though I was only two, I looked a lot older and the ads that ran often featured me as a school-aged child thinking about Alaga Syrup.
I don’t remember wishing anything about Alaga Syrup. I wasn’t even in school yet. Still, I think of it fondly because it was, technically, my first job.
There are a few special places I love to write…Anywhere on the Cape where there are dunes nearby like in this picture:
Dunes in Cape CodHere in Brooklyn where I live: (Yes, there really are trees in New York City!)
Brooklyn tree-shaded streetSitting on the yellow chair in my office:
Jacqueline Woodson
USA flag (b.1963)
Jacqueline Woodson is an American author who writes books targeted at children and adolescents.
Genres: Literary Fiction, Young Adult Fiction, Romance, Children's Fiction
New Books
September 2020
(hardback)
Before the Ever After
Novels
Last Summer with Maizon (1990)
The Dear One (1991)
Maizon At Blue Hill (1992)
Between Madison & Palmetto (1993)
I Hadn't Meant to Tell You This (1994)
Autobiography Of A Family Photo (1995)
From The Notebooks Of Melanin Sun (1995)
The House You Pass On The Way (1997)
If You Come Softly ... (1998)
Lena (1999)
Miracle's Boys (2000)
Hush (2002)
Locomotion (2003)
Behind You (2004)
Feathers (2007)
After Tupac and D Foster (2008)
Peace, Locomotion (2009)
If You Come Softly and Behind You (2010)
Beneath a Meth Moon (2012)
Another Brooklyn (2016)
Harbor Me (2018)
Red at the Bone (2019)
Before the Ever After (2020)
thumbthumbthumbthumb
thumbthumbthumbthumb
thumbthumbthumbthumb
thumbthumbthumbthumb
thumbthumbthumbthumb
thumbthumbthumb
Collections
No Such Thing as the Real World (2009) (with An Na, M T Anderson, K L Going, Beth Kephart and Chris Lynch)
thumb
Picture Books
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1990)
We Had a Picnic This Sunday Past (1998)
Sweet, Sweet Memory (2000)
The Other Side (2001)
Our Gracie Aunt (2001)
Visiting Day (2001)
Coming On Home Soon (2004)
Miss Grace's House (2005)
Show Way (2005)
Pecan Pie Baby (2010)
Each Kindness (2012)
This Is the Rope (2013)
The Day You Begin (2018)
thumbthumbthumbthumb
thumbthumbthumbno image available
thumbthumbthumbthumb
thumb
Series contributed to
Ghostwriter
Write Now! (1994)
The Book Chase (1994)
thumbthumb
The One
Before Her (2019)
thumb
Anthologies edited
A Way Out of No Way (1996)
thumb
Non fiction
Brown Girl Dreaming (2014)
thumb
Jacqueline Woodson
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to navigationJump to search
Jacqueline Woodson
Woodson at the 2018 U.S. National Book Festival
Woodson at the 2018 U.S. National Book Festival
Born Jacqueline Amanda Woodson
February 12, 1963 (age 57)
Columbus, Ohio, United States
Occupation Writer
Nationality American
Period 1990-present
Genre Young adult fiction
Subject African-American literature
Notable works
Miracle's Boys (2000)
Show Way (2006)
Feathers (2007)
After Tupac and D Foster (2008)
Brown Girl Dreaming (2014)
Notable awards National Book Award
National Ambassador for Young People's Literature
Partner Juliet Widoff
Children 2
Website
jacquelinewoodson.com
Jacqueline Woodson (born February 12, 1963) is an American writer of books for children and 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,[1] she was named the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, by the Library of Congress, for 2018–19. She was also a visiting fellow at the American Library in Paris in spring of 2017.
Contents
1 Early years
2 Writing career
2.1 Inspirations
2.2 Style
2.3 Teaching
3 Themes
3.1 Gender
3.2 African-American society and history
3.3 Economic status
3.4 Sexual identity
4 Critical response
5 Censorship
6 Personal life
7 Awards and honors
8 Complete works
8.1 Novels
8.2 Middle grade titles
8.3 Young adult titles
8.4 Illustrated works
9 Adaptations
9.1 Film
9.2 Audio recordings
10 See also
11 References
12 External links
Early years
Jacqueline Woodson was born in Columbus, Ohio, and lived in Nelsonville, Ohio, before her family moved south.[2] 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.[3][4]
Writing career
[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.[5]
After college, Woodson went to work for Kirchoff/Wohlberg, a children's packaging company. She helped to write the California standardized reading tests and caught the attention of Liza Pulitzer-Voges, a children's book agent at the same company. Although the partnership did not work out, it did get Woodson's first manuscript out of a drawer. She then enrolled in Bunny Gable's children's book writing class at The New School, where Bebe Willoughby, an editor at Delacorte, heard a reading from Last Summer with Maizon and requested the manuscript. Delacorte bought the manuscript, but Willoughby left the company before editing it and so Wendy Lamb took over and saw Woodson's first six books published.[6]
Inspirations
Woodson's youth was split between South Carolina and Brooklyn. In her interview with Jennifer M. Brown she remembered: "The South was so lush and so slow-moving and so much about community. The city was thriving and fast-moving and electric. Brooklyn was so much more diverse: on the block where I grew up, there were German people, people from the Dominican Republic, people from Puerto Rico, African-Americans from the South, Caribbean-Americans, Asians."[6]
When asked to name her literary influences in an interview with journalist Hazel Rochman, Woodson responded: "Two major writers for me are James Baldwin and Virginia Hamilton. It blew me away to find out Virginia Hamilton was a sister like me. Later, Nikki Giovanni had a similar effect on me. I feel that I learned how to write from Baldwin. He was onto some future stuff, writing about race and gender long before people were comfortable with those dialogues. He would cross class lines all over the place, and each of his characters was remarkably believable. I still pull him down from my shelf when I feel stuck."[7] Other early influences included Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Sula, and the work of Rosa Guy, as well as her high-school English teacher, Mr. Miller.[6] Louise Meriwether was also named.[8]
Style
As an author, Woodson's known for the detailed physical landscapes she writes into each of her books. She places boundaries everywhere—social, economic, physical, sexual, racial—then has her characters break through both the physical and psychological boundaries to create a strong and emotional story.[6] She is also known for her optimism. She has said that she dislikes books that do not offer hope. She has offered the novel Sounder as an example of a "bleak" and "hopeless" novel. On the other hand, she enjoyed A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Even though the family was exceptionally poor, the characters experienced "moments of hope and sheer beauty". She uses this philosophy in her own writing, saying: "If you love the people you create, you can see the hope there."[6]
As a writer she consciously writes for a younger audience. There are authors who write about adolescence or from a youth's point of view, but their work is intended for adult audiences. Woodson writes about childhood and adolescence with an audience of youth in mind. In an interview on National Public Radio (NPR) she said, "I'm writing about adolescents for adolescents. And I think the main difference is when you're writing to a particular age group, especially a younger age group, you're — the writing can't be as implicit. You're more in the moment. They don't have the adult experience from which to look back. So you're in the moment of being an adolescent ... and the immediacy and the urgency is very much on the page, because that's what it feels like to be an adolescent. Everything is so important, so big, so traumatic. And all of that has to be in place for them."[9]
Teaching
Woodson has, in turn, influenced many other writers, including An Na, who credits her as being her first writing teacher.[7] She also teaches teens at the National Book Foundation's summer writing camp where she co-edits the annual anthology of their combined work.[6]
Themes
Woodson along with writer Jason Reynolds and Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden in January 2020
Some reviewers have labeled Woodson's writings as "issue-related", but she believes that her books address universal questions.[6] She has tackled subjects that were not commonly discussed when her books were published, including interracial couples, teenage pregnancy and homosexuality. She often does this with sympathetic characters put into realistic situations.[6] Woodson states that her interests lie in exploring many different perspectives through her writings, not in forcing her views onto others.[5]
Woodson has several themes that appear in many of her novels. She explores issues of gender, class and race as well as family and history. She is known for using these common themes in ground-breaking ways.[7] While many of her characters are given labels that make them "invisible" to society, Woodson is most often writing about their search for self rather than a search for equality or social justice.[5]
Gender
Only The Notebooks of Melanin Sun, Miracle's Boys and Locomotion are written from a male perspective. The rest of Woodson's works feature female narrators.[7] However, her 2009 short story "Trev", published in How Beautiful the Ordinary: Twelve Stories of Identity, features a transgender male narrator.
African-American society and history
Black women have been everywhere--building the railroads, cleaning the kitchens, starting revolutions, writing poetry, leading voter registration drives and leading slaves to freedom. We've been there and done that. I want the people who have come before me to be part of the stories that I'm telling, because if it weren't for them, I wouldn't be telling stories.[7]
In her 2003 novel, Coming on Home Soon, she explores both race and gender within the historical context of World War II.[7]
The Other Side is a poetic look at race through two young girls, one black and one white, who sit on either side of the fence that separates their worlds.[5]
In November 2014, Daniel Handler, the master of ceremonies at the National Book Awards, made a joke about watermelons when Woodson received an award. In a New York Times Op-Ed published shortly thereafter, "The Pain of the Watermelon Joke," Woodson explained that "in making light of that deep and troubled history" with his joke, Daniel Handler had come from a place of ignorance. She underscored the need for her mission to "give people a sense of this country's brilliant and brutal history, so no one ever thinks they can walk onto a stage one evening and laugh at another's too often painful past."[10]
Economic status
The Dear One is notable for dealing with the differences between rich and poor within the black community.[5]
Sexual identity
The House You Pass on the Way is a novel that touches on gay identity through the main characters of Staggerlee.[7]
Staggerlee knows who she is for the most part, but her friend Trout is struggling, conforming, trying to fit in somewhere. I wish I had had this book when I was a kid and trying to fit in while being a tomboy and so unfeminine.[7]
In The Dear One Woodson introduces a strongly committed lesbian relationship between Marion and Bernadette. She then contrasts it to the broken straight family that results in a teenager from Harlem named Rebecca moving in with them and their 12-year-old daughter, Feni.[5]
Critical response
Last Summer with Maizon, Woodson's first book, was praised by critics for creating positive female characters and the touching portrayal of the close eleven-year-old friends. Reviewers also commented on its convincing sense of place and vivid character relationships. The next two books in the trilogy, Maizon at Blue Hill and Between Madison and Palmetto, were also well received for their realistic characters and strong writing style. The issues of self-esteem and identity are addressed throughout the three books.[5] A few reviewers felt that there was a slight lack of focus as the trilogy touched lightly and quickly on too many different problems in too few pages.
Announcing her as recipient of the ALA Margaret A. Edwards Award in 2006, the citation of the panel of librarians chair stated: "Woodson's books are powerful, groundbreaking and very personal explorations of the many ways in which identity and friendship transcend the limits of stereotype."[11]
Censorship
Some of the topics covered in Woodson's books raise flags for many censors. Homosexuality, child abuse, harsh language and other content have led to issues with censorship. In an interview on NPR Woodson said that she uses very few curse words in her books and that the issues adults have with her subject matter say more about what they are uncomfortable with than it does what their students should be thinking about. She suggests that people look at the various outside influences teens have access to today, then compare that to the subject matter in her books.[9]
Personal life
Woodson lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with her partner Juliet Widoff, a physician. The couple have two children, a daughter named Toshi Georgianna and a son named Jackson-Leroi.[12]
Awards and honors
Coretta Scott King Award honor in 1995, 1996 and 2013[13]
ALA Best Book for Young Adults in 1998, 2000, 2003, 2004 and 2005[14]
Coretta Scott King Award winner in 2001 and 2015[13][15]
2005 YALSA Quick Picks for Reluctant Young Adult Readers for Behind You[16]
2006 Margaret A. Edwards Award[17]
2009 Newbery Honor for After Tupac and D Foster[18]
2009 Josette Frank Award for After Tupac and D Foster
2009 Pennsylvania Young Reader's Choice Awards for Peace Locomotion
2009 Keystone to Reading Book Award for Peace Locomotion
2014 Hans Christian Andersen Award, U.S. nominee
2014 National Book Award in Young People's Literature for Brown Girl Dreaming
2015 Young People's Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation[19]
2017 May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture at the American Library Association, recognizes significant contribution to children's literature.[20]
2018–19 National Ambassador for Young People's Literature for the Library of Congress.[21]
2018 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award
2019 Nomination Goodread's Choice Award Best Fiction.[22]
2020 Hans Christian Andersen Award, winner[23]
Complete works
Novels
Autobiography of a Family Photo (1995)
Another Brooklyn (2016)[24]
Red at the Bone (2019)[25]
Middle grade titles
Last Summer with Maizon (1990)
Maizon at Blue Hill (1992)
Between Madison and Palmetto (1993)
Feathers (2007)
After Tupac and D Foster (2008)
Peace Locomotion (2009)
Locomotion (2010), verse novel
Brown Girl Dreaming (2014), verse novel
Harbor Me (2018)
Young adult titles
The Dear One (1990)
I Hadn't Meant to Tell You This (1994)
From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun (1995)
The House You Pass on the Way (1997)
If You Come Softly (1998)
Lena (1999)
Miracle's Boys (2000)
Hush (2002)
Behind You (2004)
Beneath a Meth Moon (2012)
The Letter Q: Queer Writers' Notes to Their Younger Selves (2012) (Contributor)
Illustrated works
Martin Luther King, Jr. and His Birthday (nonfiction), illus. Floyd Cooper (1990)
Book Chase, illus. Steve Cieslawski (1994)
We Had a Picnic This Sunday Past, illus. Diane Greenseid (1997)
Sweet, Sweet Memory, illus. Floyd Cooper (2000)
The Other Side, illus. E. B. Lewis (2001)
Visiting Day, illus. James Ransome (2002)
Our Gracie Aunt, illus. Jon J. Muth (2002)
Coming on Home Soon, illus. E. B. Lewis (2003)
Show Way, illus. Hudson Talbott (2006)
Pecan Pie Baby, illus. Sophie Blackall (2010)
Each Kindness, illus. E. B. Lewis (2012)
This Is the Rope, illus. James Ransome (2013)
The Day You Begin, illus. Rafael López (2018)
Adaptations
Film
Filmmaker Spike Lee and others made Miracle's Boys into a miniseries, airing in 2005.[26]
Audio recordings
I Hadn't Meant to Tell You This, Recorded Books, 1999
Lena, Recorded Books, 1999
Miracle's Boys, Listening Library, 2001
Locomotion, Recorded Books, 2003
Jacqueline Woodson's memoir BROWN GIRL DREAMING won the 2014 National Book Award and was a NY Times Bestseller. Her novel, ANOTHER BROOKLYN, was a National Book Award finalist and an Indie Pick in 2016. Among her many awards, she the recipient of the Kurt Vonnegut Award, four Newbery Honors, two Coretta Scott King Award, and the Langston Hughes Medal. Jacqueline is the author of nearly thirty books for young people and adults including EACH KINDNESS, IF YOU COME SOFTLY, LOCOMOTION and I HADN'T MEANT TO TELL YOU THIS. She served as Young People's Poet Laureate from 2014-2016, was a fellow at The American Library in Paris, occasionally writes for the New York Times, is currently working on more books and like so many writers - lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.
Jacqueline Woodson (www.jacquelinewoodson.com) is the recipient of the 2020 Hans Christian Andersen Award, the 2018 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, and the 2018 Children’s Literature Legacy Award. She was the 2018–2019 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, and in 2015, she was named the Young People’s Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. She received the 2014 National Book Award for her New York Times bestselling memoir Brown Girl Dreaming, which was also a recipient of the Coretta Scott King Award, a Newbery Honor, the NAACP Image Award, and a Sibert Honor. She wrote the adult books Red at the Bone, a New York Times bestseller, and Another Brooklyn, a 2016 National Book Award finalist. Born in Columbus, Ohio, Jacqueline grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, and Brooklyn, New York, and graduated from college with a B.A. in English. She is the author of dozens of award-winning books for young adults, middle graders, and children; among her many accolades, she is a four-time Newbery Honor winner, a four-time National Book Award finalist, and a two-time Coretta Scott King Award winner. Her books include New York Times bestsellers The Day You Begin and Harbor Me; The Other Side, Each Kindness, Caldecott Honor book Coming On Home Soon; Newbery Honor winners Feathers, Show Way, and After Tupac and D Foster; and Miracle’s Boys, which received the LA Times Book Prize and the Coretta Scott King Award. Jacqueline is also a recipient of the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement for her contributions to young adult literature and a two-time winner of the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.
Jacqueline Woodson: ‘It’s important to know that whatever moment we’re in, it's not the first time'
Joanna Scutts
Fiction
With more than 30 children’s books to her name and Judy Blume and the Obamas as fans, the US bestseller has written a book for adults. She explains why
Sat 18 Jan 2020 10.58 GMTLast modified on Mon 27 Jan 2020 11.41 GMT
Shares
246
Jacqueline Woodson.
Jacqueline Woodson. Photograph: Ali Smith/The Guardian
Author Jacqueline Woodson lives in a quintessential Brooklyn brownstone with her partner, two children, a cat and two huge, friendly dogs. A similar house is at the centre of her new novel, Red at the Bone, representing the struggle of a multigenerational black family to honour its past and stand firm against change.
The novel opens in 2001, as 16-year-old Melody descends the stairs in a debutante’s traditional white dress. An orchestra is playing the Prince song she’s insisted on, against her mother’s wishes, while white passersby stop and gawk through the windows. Her coming-of-age party is a declaration of family pride, class status, and an effort to repair a broken link with the past, when Melody’s mother, Iris, skipped her own ceremony after becoming pregnant at 15. The novel explores this rift and its consequences over time, shifting between the perspectives of different family members and offering unusual narrative freedom for Woodson, who writes primarily for younger readers. “With adults, you can play around with time,’” she says. “I have a much larger canvas.”
Red at the Bone is Woodson’s second novel for adults, following 2016’s Another Brooklyn as well as her widely praised 2014 memoir-in-poems, Brown Girl Dreaming, which won the prestigious National Book Award for young people’s literature. That genre-tweaking bestseller brought to life Woodson’s early childhood, moving from her birthplace of Ohio in 1963, to South Carolina later in the 1960s amid the fierce battles of the civil rights movement, to Brooklyn, where the author has spent most of her life since.
Sign up for Bookmarks: discover new books in our weekly email
Read more
Brown Girl Dreaming expanded Woodson’s audience. She had already written more than 30 books for young readers, winning numerous awards including, in 2018, the Astrid Lindgren memorial prize, which she’s using to fund an arts organisation supporting early-career writers of colour. Since the publication of her first book in 1990, Woodson has been tireless in arguing the need to diversify the predominantly white publishing industry and for children’s literature to better reflect the lives and identities of its readers. Balancing writing with advocacy, she has recently served as the US young people’s poet laureate and the national ambassador for young people’s literature, and counts Judy Blume and the Obamas among her many fans. She is clearly not a writer who feels hemmed in by genre – her next projects include a novel for readers aged eight to 12, several articles, a screenplay adaptation of Red at the Bone, a television project and a book of non-fiction. She doesn’t choose the format ahead of time. Instead, she says, “the story dictates” who the audience will be.
When I’m writing something poetic and the voice feels young, it’s going to be a picture book
“I know when I’m writing something poetic and the voice feels young, it’s going to be a picture book,” she explains. “If there’s an immediacy to it, I know it’s probably going to be for middle graders. If there’s a spareness to it, I know it’s probably young adult or adult, because there’s a lot more that older people can infer.”
All of her books place black children and teenagers at the centre of their own stories, and even in her adult fiction she writes young characters with deep respect and sensitivity. It’s common to describe a children’s author who produces a book for adults as having “developed” or matured in some way, but Woodson believes it’s much harder for adult authors to write well for children than the other way round.
Advertisement
“A lot of adults want to forget that period, or have forgotten it, so when they come back to writing for children, it becomes didactic,” she says. “They don’t remember that as a young reader, you didn’t want to read to learn, you wanted to read to escape.”
Those dismissive attitudes to children’s literature are connected, Woodson believes, to the many ways that young people are overlooked and misjudged by society at large. Teenage boys, especially boys of colour, may be the most misjudged of all, which is one reason why, in Red at the Bone, which explores Iris’s pregnancy, Woodson chose to slant her narrative toward the perspective of Aubrey, the sensitive, overwhelmed young father. Raised in poverty by a single mother, and moving often between shabby apartments, Aubrey is in awe of Iris’s confidence. But it’s not until he sees inside her home, with its “upright piano beneath framed portraits of ancient family members” that he becomes conscious of the class divide between them.
“I really wanted to write against that stereotype of the macho guy,” she says. “So much of what becomes toxic in masculinity is that young men aren’t allowed to talk about the fear of their first sexual encounter, or the pain of it, or so often the reluctance.”
‘I feel like I could write about Brooklyn for the next 50 years, and I’ll write a different story every time.’
FacebookTwitterPinterest
‘I feel like I could write about Brooklyn for the next 50 years, and I’ll write a different story every time.’ Photograph: Kathy Willens/AP
Advertisement
As the mother of a pre-teenage son, she was particularly keen to represent those unspoken emotions honestly. But her interest in Aubrey’s point of view doesn’t overshadow her empathy for Iris, the young mother who finds the responsibility of family suffocating and escapes to college, where she is free to rediscover and reinvent herself.
“I didn’t want to make her a villain, because I think that’s my instinct in thinking about what kind of mom would want to leave her child,” she says. “But when you really start excavating it, you see that all kinds of mothers do – regardless of economic class, regardless of race. Someone who gets pregnant at 15, who’s not even out of childhood herself, of course it makes sense that she changed her mind.” Just as with Aubrey, Woodson’s interest in writing Iris’s story lay in subverting expectations and avoiding easy judgments.
Another constant in her fiction for all ages is her fascination with the diverse and ever-changing New York borough that she has called home since the 70s. Like Aubrey, Woodson grew up in Bushwick, a mostly black and Latino neighbourhood at the time, which has since gentrified visibly: “The block I grew up on is now predominantly white.”
The dedication in her novel Another Brooklyn is: “For Bushwick (1970–1990) In Memory”, marking the loss of people and culture that occurs when the hipsters and the money move in. Woodson recalls her own struggles to rent an apartment as an adult in the 90s, repeatedly being told that somewhere was no longer available. “Landlords were saying: ‘Don’t rent to black folks, don’t rent to queer folks, don’t rent to single moms.’”
Yet Brooklyn’s density and variety are what make it easy to bring characters, like Iris and Aubrey, together across a class divide and to investigate what unites and separates them. “I think the thing that’s so interesting about Brooklyn is that you can walk 10 blocks and be in a very different neighbourhood ethnically, in terms of economic class, even in terms of architecture,” Woodson says. “I feel like I could write about Brooklyn for the next 50 years, and I’ll write a different story every time.”
I think the further we get away from 9/11, the more it becomes this theoretical thing
The story of Iris and Aubrey’s reluctantly intertwined families shows how class is connected to the larger history of race in the US, and the exclusions and reversals that have historically undermined black prosperity. Following the civil war and the abolition of slavery, many African Americans who managed to join the middle class struggled to hold on to their wealth or pass it down to future generations – especially in the face of rising discrimination and violence in the early 20th century. These legacies of loss, Woodson suggests, affect what’s possible for their descendants. Aubrey’s mother is a hardworking, educated woman who nonetheless remains trapped in poverty, while Iris’s family is more financially secure, yet haunted by the destruction of its property in the Tulsa riots of 1921. Over the course of 24 hours, a wealthy black neighbourhood was attacked, looted and set alight by a white mob, a wholesale spree of destruction that claimed between 100 and 300 lives, and whose perpetrators faced no consequences of any kind.
Advertisement
Woodson thinks it a “travesty” that the history and impact of the Tulsa massacre are not more widely taught in American schools. She didn’t learn about it herself until she was in her 20s, “and then I was mad”, she says. “How could it not be written down? When I have questions, they usually become novels.” Accordingly, the violence becomes a powerful origin story for Iris’s family, and especially for her mother Sabe, who insists on repeating the story to her daughter and granddaughter as a way of teaching them to protect what’s theirs. Red at the Bone’s dedication is a fragment of poetry, “for the ancestors, a long long line / of you, bending and twisting / bending and twisting.” It describes the contortions necessary for survival, but also the length and strength of a family story.
A New York City firefighter calls for more rescue workers in the rubble of the World Trade Center, September 2001.
FacebookTwitterPinterest
A New York City firefighter calls for more rescue workers in the rubble of the World Trade Center, September 2001. Photograph: Preston Keres/US Navy
The other major historical event that shapes the novel is 9/11, one that has also been vulnerable to distortion and myth-making. It’s important for Woodson that the memory of the attacks includes the victims who were not white-collar workers or emergency responders but “the janitors, the secretaries, the people working in the kitchens” who often came from communities of colour, and whose losses tend to be overlooked. “I think the further we get away from 9/11, the more it becomes this theoretical thing,” she says. “We remember the planes hitting the buildings, but do we remember the photos everywhere you went: ‘Have you seen my wife? Have you seen my husband? Have you seen my child?’”
Woodson herself was on a book tour in Pennsylvania, and five months pregnant, when the attack happened. She recalls talking to her partner, a junior doctor, who was helping in one of the hospitals. “I asked her: ‘Is it crazy there?’ And she said: ‘No, there are no bodies.’ And there was that moment where it just hit me.” As Sabe realises in the novel, such visceral memories are hard to hold on to and hard to pass down through the generations. Woodson thinks the attacks are still “obscure” to her children as a historical event. “My daughter’s graduating high school and she knows what it was, she knows that we know people who died, she knows that there was a war directly afterwards,” she says. “My son knows that once there were buildings there, but he’s always only known the Freedom Tower. He doesn’t know the gap that existed.”
Advertisement
She is fascinated by the unpredictable ways in which what we call our “private” lives become part of a wider shared history, noting the rise in pregnancies that occurred after 9/11 “because people were panicked, and they clung to each other”. And the patterns of the past repeat. Her daughter was one of many children in Manhattan and Brooklyn affected by asthma in the fallout from 9/11. For Woodson, this recalled the prevalence of lead poisoning from paint in the 60s, which affected her younger brother. “And then, we look at Michigan and what’s happening with the water, and the kids are getting poisoned again.”
For a different writer, that repetition might be a source of despair. But over her years of writing for children, Woodson has learned that even if a happy ending isn’t required, there still has to be some hope in the story. “It’s so important to know that whatever moment we’re in, we’re not in it for the first time,” she says. “Knowing that something like this has happened before, and that we survived it, is really important for me as a writer.”
• Red at the Bone is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson on 23 January (£14.99).
Credit...Sharif Hamza for The New York Times
Sections
SKIP TO CONTENTSKIP TO SITE INDEX
Account
FEATURE
Jacqueline Woodson Transformed Children’s Literature. Now She’s Writing for Herself.
The award-winning author on her mission to diversify publishing — and why she turned back to adult readers with her new novel, “Red at the Bone.”
Credit...Sharif Hamza for The New York Times
By Kat Chow
Sept. 19, 2019
21
When Jacqueline Woodson’s mother died, late in the summer of 2009, the writer and her siblings had to sort out what to do with the Brooklyn building where they spent much of their childhoods. Their mother bought a three-story townhouse in the Bushwick neighborhood decades earlier, for only $30,000, and by the time she died, a development boom was spilling over from neighboring Williamsburg, driving up values and driving out residents. But Woodson did not find herself dealing with a readily lucrative asset: Because of predatory lending that targeted black homeowners, she says, her mother died owing $300,000, and the house was in foreclosure. “My siblings and I are like, ‘Let’s just short-sell it; let’s just dump it,’ ” Woodson says. But the more she visited the building — traveling across the borough from the Park Slope townhouse she shares with her partner and their two children — the more she felt herself wanting to hold on to her childhood home, one of the first places she lived in Brooklyn after moving from Greenville, S.C., at 7.
Woodson is a prolific author of books for children and young adults, and at the time, she was at work on a few different projects. One was “Brown Girl Dreaming,” a memoir in verse that would win the 2014 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. But there was also an impressionistic adult novel, “Another Brooklyn,” in which a woman, unable to confront her mother’s death, recalls her childhood in the Bushwick of the 1970s, when the area was undergoing white flight instead of the more recent outflux of black and Latinx residents. That one would become a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction.
“At the end,” Woodson says, “I was like, ‘You know, this was my mother’s dream.’ This was the whole Great Migration, for her to come from the South to Brooklyn, to eventually buy a home and to get her kids launched.” So Woodson took a loan against her own townhouse and began renovating her mother’s home for rental. The process made her interested in writing a new story, about the precariousness of generational wealth, especially for black families. She had also been jotting down notes about the Tulsa Massacre of 1921 — two days of violence in which a mob of white Oklahomans attacked and burned what was then one of the wealthiest black communities in the United States, killing as many as 300 people.
Woodson has woven both threads into her latest book, “Red at the Bone,” published this month. Beginning in New York in the months before Sept. 11, 2001, it moves back and forth through time, tracing the history and legacy of both sides of its central character’s family. It is Woodson’s third-ever novel for adults and the second within the last three years — a book that highlights her potential to have as big an impact on adult literature as she’s had on younger readers. At 56, Woodson is already the author of 21 novels, 13 picture books and one memoir, publishing a title nearly every year since 1990. She has won countless major literary awards, some in multiples. When she first began publishing books, the industry was considerably whiter, from the people who made the books to the characters inside them. Many credit Woodson herself with helping to change that, at least incrementally. She has broadened the scope of children’s and young-adult literature in particular, and not just in terms of its demographics; her work has been challenged in some schools and libraries because of its frank portrayals of sexuality and interracial relationships, something she first learned during a phone conversation with the Y.A. giant Judy Blume. (“Love Jackie Woodson,” Blume said, when asked about this.) Woodson writes “in a way that feels unbridled by the marketplace,” says Lisa Lucas, the executive director of the National Book Foundation. “I think of her as a person with very few limits, whether that’s moving between poetry and prose, whether that’s moving between adult and young reader.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story
“Red at the Bone” is also the first time Woodson has written adult fiction set in her longtime home of Park Slope. That’s where I found her on a muggy afternoon this summer, at a bakery she used to frequent when she was working on “Brown Girl Dreaming.” She’d just returned from a trip to Ghana with her family and was fighting jet lag as she told me how this neighborhood, too, had changed. When she bought a house here 16 years ago, she said, some people still called it “Dyke Slope,” and its residents were more diverse. Now, Woodson said, her family was one of only a few households of color on her block, and she’d grown wary of types like “that neighbor who keeps asking for a play date because you know they want their kid to have a black friend.”
She has often mined similar dynamics in her writing. A poem in “Brown Girl Dreaming” about her great-grandfather William Woodson, the only black child at his white school, also inspired her to write a picture book, “The Day You Begin,” published last year, which shows young children navigating spaces where nobody else looks quite like them. When I told Woodson that my oldest sister cried while reading it, and that she sometimes marks up the white characters in her baby’s picture books so they look Asian, like my family, Woodson smiled. She’d already told me, in a phone call weeks earlier, that her need to write comes from her deep indignation at growing up “in a time when my ordinary life wasn’t represented” — how “every time I read a book as a kid where I didn’t see myself, I was like, you know, ‘[expletive] this!’ I wasn’t allowed to curse then, but looking back on it, I’m sure that was what I was thinking.”
Thanks for reading The Times.
Subscribe to The Times
I don’t remember my mother reading to me or my sisters picture books with any human characters at all. Instead, she read us books with animals as protagonists — talking cats or owls or dogs with funny hats — which may have been her way to combat that absence of us on the page. It would have been comforting, I thought, to have had books like Woodson’s when I was a child. And it would have been validating in the most essential way to have seen characters whose everyday lives looked like mine.
“When I go into classrooms,” Woodson said, “I’ll look at the class makeup and it will be all these kids of color, and they’ll have all these books with no people of color in them. I’m like: ‘Come on! Is it just by accident or by design that you’re not letting the literature reflect your young people?’ ” Books, she said, should act as both mirrors and windows, a metaphor from an eminent scholar of children’s literature, Rudine Sims Bishop — they should both reflect people’s experiences and offer windows into different worlds. “These kids are in classrooms with all these windows and no mirrors, no books that reflect them.” As a young reader, as a girl growing up in black and brown neighborhoods in South Carolina and then in New York, Woodson found plenty of windows but not enough mirrors. So she began to make her own.
Editors’ Picks
A Teacher Held a Famous Racism Exercise in 1968. She’s Still at It.
‘I Am Going to Physically Explode’: Mom Rage in a Pandemic
The Day the White Working Class Turned Republican
Continue reading the main story
If you went to elementary school a few decades ago, in California or Texas or Virginia, and you took a statewide standardized test, there’s a small chance you were among Woodson’s earliest readers. After college at Adelphi University, she held various jobs before she was able to write full time, including one as a drama therapist for homeless and runaway teenagers in New York and another writing short stories for children’s reading-comprehension tests. It was in the latter capacity that she wrote about a fictional girl named Maizon, who would — after Woodson received encouragement at a children’s-book-writing class at the New School — become the protagonist of her first novel, published when she was 27. A 1990 review of the book in The Times noted her “sure understanding of the thoughts of young people,” closing with the hope that “Woodson’s pen writes steadily on” — which it did, and at a terrific clip. There were books like “From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun,” in 1995, about a boy whose mother tells him she is gay; “Miracle’s Boys,” in 2000, about three young brothers in Harlem, which won a Coretta Scott King Award; and “Beneath a Meth Moon,” in 2012, winner of an American Library Association “Best Fiction for Young Adults” award, about a teenager’s addiction and the fallout of Hurricane Katrina.
ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story
Woodson hadn’t entirely planned on writing for young people. She had always wanted to write everything, across genres and media; her inspirations were figures like Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou and Nikki Giovanni. But she credits that class at the New School with guiding her to look at the interior lives of children. “I thought, Here is where my voice can be heard,” she says. “Here is where my voice is very necessary.”
In 1985, of the estimated 2,500 children’s books published in the United States, only 18 were by black authors or illustrators, according to research by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Last year, of the 3,653 books submitted to the C.C.B.C., 202 were by African or African-American writers and illustrators — a notable but imperfect improvement. There were many factors in this change, but many in the industry will tell you that Woodson’s decades of writing are among them.
“She has just set a standard for herself and for others,” says Kathleen T. Horning, the director of the C.C.B.C. “I think when kids read her books, they feel like it’s somebody who isn’t making the world seem different from how it is.” Jason Reynolds, a writer of children’s and young-adult books, says Woodson has spent her career challenging the industry to help children understand themselves and their surroundings: “It doesn’t have to be this hokey, you know, apple-pie type of story. Nor does it have to be about slaves.” He points to Woodson’s middle-grade novel “Harbor Me,” published last year — a sort of “reimagining of ‘The Breakfast Club,’ ” he says, where students gather every week in a classroom to talk about their lives, like one child’s fear that his missing father has been deported.
Woodson’s intuition for what motivates people — and her eye for capturing stories that are harder to find on the page — emerges even more in her adult literature. “Red at the Bone” revolves around a teenage pregnancy that draws together two black families of different social classes. Iris leaves her baby, Melody, at home in Park Slope to be raised by her family and the baby’s father and tries to forge an independent identity for herself; the novel takes its name from her longing for another woman while she’s a student at Oberlin, the way she “felt red at the bone — like there was something inside of her undone and bleeding.” The older generations of Iris’s family, we learn, fled the Tulsa Massacre to settle in New York City and try to rebuild their wealth, all the while knowing how tenuous that effort might be. “Those white folks came with their torches and their rages,” says Sabe, the matriarch whose mother was nearly burned to death as a child. “Turned my people’s lives and dreams to ash. So my mama taught me all I know about holding on to what’s yours. I know you hold on to your dreams and you hold on to your money.” In July, the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates took to Instagram to praise the book. “This is the wealth gap as literature,” he wrote. “But it never says that. Never didactic.” Certain topics, he told me later by phone, can be difficult to communicate to people directly. “It’s become really clear to me,” he said, “that sometimes those things are better said in the form of stories and in fiction.”
There is an urgency to Woodson’s writing in the book, as though she’s willing her characters to reveal the humanity of real-life people. Amid the increase of racist political rhetoric over the past few years, she said, working on the novel “felt like writing against such a tide.” She recalled a conversation she had with her partner, Juliet Widoff, after Donald Trump announced his campaign for the presidency. “Juliet was like, ‘This is so ridiculous; this is such a joke.’ ” But Woodson was traveling the country promoting her memoir and noticing what she describes as “a lot of white rage.” She disagreed: “I’m like, ‘He’s going to win.’ ”
And in the world of children’s books, she saw a related sense of agitation. There, white writers were trying to create characters of color but receiving criticism from people of color who felt that those stories were not being thoughtfully or accurately told and that they should be the ones telling them. These conversations were clearly new ones for some of the people involved, but they were entirely familiar to Woodson. Twenty-one years ago, in 1998, she wrote an essay in The Horn Book Magazine, a children’s-literature journal, titled “Who Can Tell My Story” — a foundational piece that questioned whether white people who had only other white people in their lives were equipped to tell the stories of black, brown or immigrant folks. She wasn’t particularly surprised to find herself, decades later, watching the same discussions unfold, only now in concert with vitriolic news cycles. She saw, she says, “a lot of people panicking about diversity” — a lot of people “trying to get a foothold of where they fit into the movement.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story
ImageWoodson’s intuition for what motivates people — and her eye for capturing stories that are harder to find on the page — emerges even more in her adult literature.
Woodson’s intuition for what motivates people — and her eye for capturing stories that are harder to find on the page — emerges even more in her adult literature.Credit...Sharif Hamza for The New York Times
The day after we met in Brooklyn, Woodson and I sat together on a train, heading north to an old farmhouse in Brewster, N.Y., en route to a place Woodson calls “Baldwin.” Last year, after winning the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, the world’s largest prize for children’s literature, Woodson used the half-million dollars in prize money to help start Baldwin for the Arts, an organization that will give fellowships to emerging artists of color in the name of the writer James Baldwin. Woodson owns the farmhouse and the property and plans to renovate the outbuildings, where people will stay and work on their art.
As the city receded behind us, giving way to suburbs and trees, I wondered if Woodson ever tired of the additional work she’d taken on as a writer — if she felt trapped by an obligation to constantly explain the need for her work to others. To be black or brown or immigrant or queer in any prominent capacity, in spaces where there aren’t many people like you, means that you’ll most likely find yourself an ambassador, tasked with justifying your existence and your value. It also means that others like you will look to you for guidance.
At first, Woodson said, she was a “reluctant ambassador.” Part of her once felt overwhelmed that she would have to engage constantly with “so many people who don’t see us, who never even thought about people of color at all.” But as a measured, patient person — perhaps, she says, because of being raised a Jehovah’s Witness — she eventually accepted the role, promoting young people’s literature for national organizations and becoming an outspoken voice within the industry. When she won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature in 2014, she wound up having to explain to people — including in a Times Op-Ed — why it was hurtful that the event’s M.C., her friend Daniel Handler, tried to make a joke about her allergy to watermelon. Jason Reynolds recalled another story from that time. A reporter asked Woodson how it felt to win the biggest award of her career, and she responded, according to Reynolds, almost as a reflex: “Says who? Why is this award any different than the Coretta Scott King awards that I’ve won? Why is it any different than all the other accolades that you may not have heard of, or that you may not respect?”
At the train station, Widoff and the couple’s daughter, Toshi, picked us up, and we circled a reservoir until we reached a long driveway. From the road, we could see a large red barn with white trim, and at the end of the drive stood a stately farmhouse and a handful of guest cottages. The land and its centuries-old buildings, Woodson said, were once owned by Enoch Crosby, an American spy during the Revolutionary War. “This is going to be the kitchen space,” she said, gesturing to the first floor of a barn where cows were once milked. “This is going to be two artist studios — visual artists,” she said, near another building.
In 1995, Woodson wrote an essay, published in The Horn Book Magazine, about the invisibility of black people in literature and what it meant for her to be a black writer in the mostly white world of children’s book publishing. She was 32 then, and had just published her seventh book. “I want to leave a sign of having been here,” she wrote. “The rest of my life is committed to changing the way the world thinks, one reader at a time.”
Today, she says, “I’m thinking about the people who are coming behind me and what their mirrors and windows are, what they’re seeing and what they’re imagining themselves become.” But as she began to conceive of her two most recent adult novels, she recognized something. She wasn’t about to stop writing for young readers, but she felt a certain security with the industry she’d helped shape. “I felt like I had done what I had been called to do in the children’s-book world,” she said. “I know that sounds kind of conceited, but I went in there, I wrote 20-some books — I forget how many books I had written. I had done the work to fill that hole, and I had nurtured a bunch of other writers of color.” In all our conversations, she’d always been self-deprecating when talking about her success, but now she sounded firm and animated. “So the thing was in motion that made sense, that made me feel like: ‘O.K., you know what? I’m going to sit back — and here’s the story I want to tell now.’ ”
Kat Chow is a reporter for NPR and Code Switch. She is working on a memoir about grief and identity.
A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 22, 2019, Page 52 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Who Tells This Story?. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
Jacqueline Woodson
http://www.jacquelinewoodson.com/
Writer Jacqueline Woodson sitting on a bench outdoors, cropped from the chest up.
Image ©Toshi Widoff-Woodson.
Jacqueline Woodson was born in Columbus, Ohio and grew up in Greenville, South Carolina and Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of over 30 books for children and young adults, including From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun (1995), recipient of both the Coretta Scott King Honor and the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award; Miracle’s Boys (2000), which also won the Coretta Scott King Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Hush (2002), which was a National Book Award Finalist; Locomotion (2003), also a National Book Award Finalist; Coming on Home Soon (2004), a Caldecott Honor Book and a Booklist Editors’ Choice; and Behind You (2004), which was included in the New York Public Library’s list of best Books of the Teen Age. Three of Woodson’s books have won the Newbery Honor: Show Way (2005), Feathers (2007), and After Tupac & D Foster (2008). Her recent books include the young adult novel Beneath a Meth Moon (2012); and Brown Girl Dreaming (2014), a novel in verse about Woodson’s family and segregation in the South, which won the National Book Award and the Newbery Honor Award. In an op-ed for the New York Times, Woodson described how she wrote the book: “As I interviewed relatives in both Ohio and Greenville, SC, I began to piece together the story of my mother’s life, my grandparents’ lives and the lives of cousins, aunts and uncles. These stories, and the stories I had heard throughout my childhood, were told with the hope that I would carry on this family history and American history, so that those coming after me could walk through the world as armed as I am.”
Woodson has received numerous honors and awards for her many books. She was given the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement in writing for young adults, the St. Katharine Drexel Award, the Anne V. Zarrow Award for Young Readers’ Literature and the Hans Christian Anderson Award. Jonathan Demme is adapting her novel Beneath a Meth Moon (2012) for the screen. In 2016 she received an honorary degree from Adelphi University.
Woodson served as the Poetry Foundation's Young People's Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017. She currently lives in Brooklyn with her family.
QUOTE: "Red at the Bone is a novel packed with layers, and adds to the canon of literature that highlights an accurate account of Black family life. … These beautiful pages illuminate how race and class are experienced in gendered, patterned ways for Black women and men. In short, Woodson produces knowledge about Black Americans that pays homage to family history, historical context, and intersectionality--forms of analyses that mark a writer worthy of Black feminist theorizing."
Red at the Bone
By Jacqueline Woodson
New York, NY; Riverhead, 2019, 208 pp., $26.00, hardcover
Ever masterful, Jacqueline Woodson gifts to the literary community another account of Black life that can be read through the lens of Black feminist traditions and thought. In the 208 pages of Red at the Bone, she shows readers how multiple family, personal, and societal histories inform present and future lives and outcomes.
The novel begins with sixteen-year-old Melody and her family at her grandparents' Brooklyn brownstone. Melody is in her room preparing for her cotillion--a celebration that welcomes young girls from upper-middle-class and elite backgrounds into womanhood. A few minutes later, she stands at the top of the stairs, waiting to descend into the living room, reflecting on an earlier conversation she had with her mother, Iris. During the conversation, Melody learns that, if Iris had revealed a month or so earlier that she was pregnant, Melody would not have been born, which would have unknowingly altered the lessons about family history, race, class, gender, and choices readers are able to learn.
Although Red at the Bone holds within its pages many starting points and layers of complexity, the ceremony for Melody and the individual musings of her grandparents and parents regarding their memories teaches readers how much our past informs our present and the choices we believe we have access to. As Melody descends the staircase to join her family in the living room, Woodson pauses the ceremony to introduce readers to her parents and grandparents, and to tell their personal stories as to how they came to be in that moment--celebrating her. Melody, simply, is a symbolic representation of her parents, who are two individuals from different class backgrounds and who became parents as teenagers--binding two families, showing the uniqueness and complexity of Black family life and the not-so-clear-cut class boundaries between middle- and working-class Blacks. Thinking about how best to summarize and review Red at the Bone, I am choosing to highlight two among many critical lessons the book offers readers: the importance of family history and historical context in shaping individual lives, and the "greyness" of choice as it relates to Black womanhood.
Drawing on Black feminist traditions and thought, historical context tends to be a lens utilized to theorize about the individual and collective Black experience, particularly when discussing Black folks and family patterns. In simple terms, Black families cannot be analyzed without the inclusion of the historical context shaping their experiences, because historical context tends to illuminate some of the present reality for many Black people. Readers learn, for example, that fire and gold are historical influencers shaping the lives of the book's characters. Readers are told a story of Black life during Jim Crow and the domestic terrorism inflicted on Black communities by white supremacists. Although this story is not a main theme of the book, the reference to fire, gold, and the historical family account illuminates resiliency among Black families when faced with structural violence and strains. Iris's mother's family could have given up when domestic terrorists destroyed their community, but their ancestors stated, "You rise. You rise. You rise."
The idea of rising and its relation to Black families' historical context is displayed throughout the novel. Rising during and after violent encounters with entities and systems in place that tend to constrain Black Americans reveals how embedded the legacy of resistance is within the Black community. Without her realizing it, this historical legacy impacted Iris as she navigated identity from teenage years to adulthood. Although the challenges that she and her mother faced were different from those of their ancestors, they were able to tap into a legacy of rising against adversity.
As her eyes burned m the dim light of the reading lamp," Woodson writes, "she knew it was her mother and her mother's mother and on back to something that couldn't be broken that was driving her. The story of her life had already been written. Baby or no baby." A second lesson on historical context that Red at the Bone offers readers is the intentional and not-so-intentional perpetuation of class and race inequality. A common question I receive when teaching undergraduate students is, "Why do people who live in poverty lack the will to strive to do better?" After cringing and holding my breath, I answer the question with the comment, "That is the wrong question to ask." Instead of focusing so much on an individual's actions, I challenge my students to think about income inequality and its connection to inadequate resources, which disproportionately impacts communities of color--emphasis on Black communities. Red at the Bone captures the complexities of being a Black family from a particular class; as Woodson says, "One day chicken, next day bone."
The emphasis on race and class and their intersection with historical context is beautifully captured with Aubrey, Melody's father. One way in which Aubrey comes to understand the differences between his class background and his daughter and her family's class background is through his hands. He struggles, for instance, with placing his hands properly for the cotillion ceremony. Readers also learn that he comes to recognize that the texture of his hands is different from his daughter's family's--being that his hands are used to hard physical labor working-class individuals are known to participate in:
His mother's hands had been calloused, but he never knew why... But the
first time he shook Sabe's and Po'Boy's hands, he was surprised. He had
thought all grown-ups had rough and calloused hands. And now his own
hand inside his daughter's felt the way his mother's had... He wanted
Melody to never have hands like his mother's. And maybe that was what
being not poor was.
Aubrey's hands are like his mother's, he realizes, and thus the old question of "doing better" is addressed in Red at the Bone. Through this example, we see that the impact of income inequality combined with race inequality and combined with family history connects and informs individual experiences and outcomes from youth to adulthood.
Choices, family history, and Black womanhood are complex ideas, often tasks taken up by Black women literary and humanities scholars and social scientists. Woodson continues this tradition in Red at the Bone, as well as providing readers a lens to interrogate the "grayness" of choices as it relates to Black womanhood. Iris engages with choices in her youth, as a teenage mother. Readers learn that she plans to attend college, and with the resources afforded her due to her upper-middle-class background, that is attainable. Iris's choice and ability to act on her decision speak to her class privilege. They also challenge normative beliefs regarding motherhood and family commitment.
Iris's choice illuminates the uniqueness of Black motherhood and Black community care. The choice to attend college away from home--the empowered decision to choose self over family and community, an option not always available to many Black women--can be viewed as selfish. Iris's making this choice is why Red at the Bone is a special novel. I interpret it as a form of sacrifice some Black mothers can make to ensure the well-being of their children and community. Yes, Iris could have attended a school that was much closer to home, but perhaps at the cost of offering her child the best resources she herself was afforded as a child. Further, the option to attend college away from family illuminates the importance of community care work in the Black community. That is, Iris's choice emphasizes the integral role of "othermothers," "community mothers," and kinship ties and networks among many Black Americans.
Red at the Bone is a novel packed with layers, and adds to the canon of literature that highlights an accurate account of Black family life. If I had to summarize it in a few words, I would say it is a literary representation of Black feminist traditions and thought. Woodson marks the personal as political by showing how manifold girlhood, womanhood, sexuality, and motherhood are for Black women. These beautiful pages illuminate how race and class are experienced in gendered, patterned ways for Black women and men. In short, Woodson produces knowledge about Black Americans that pays homage to family history, historical context, and intersectionality--forms of analyses that mark a writer worthy of Black feminist theorizing.
If Red at the Bone had centered on a Black man's narrative, I don't think I would have battled with it as much. If I only had Aubrey's story to lean on, and if he made the choice that Iris made, I don't think I would have been as critical or surprised. Fathers are often given room regarding parental participation as it relates to their own education and career success--an inequality to which I, too, can fall victim. In short, I wouldn't have had as a hard a time understanding Aubrey's choice to leave his child for college. Conjuring these complicated emotions makes the book beautiful. It challenges readers to not view Black women through a one-dimensional lens particularly, as well as the larger Black community broadly. I appreciate Woodson for taking me on an intellectually stimulating journey of highs and lows.
In an April 2019 O interview, Woodson commented to Leigh Haber that "novels tend to find the people who need them." She is right. Novels such as this tend to find the people who need them, and I am one of those people. Red at the Bone challenged me to reflect on my personal history. I saw my family in those pages. I saw the challenges of being a Black girl growing up in America, where I am constantly trying to overcome family circumstance and understand more of who I am.
A novel told in the traditions of Black feminism incorporates the historical, so we can properly inform, complicate, and challenge conditions within a political moment. Marking the personal as political relies on historical accounts. Such accounts inform the choices we make; they shape who we are--and perhaps where we are going.
Reviewed by LaToya Council
LaToya Council is the author of IntersectionAllies: We Make Room for All. A social justice activist and an academic scholar, she is currently working on her dissertation Her Work, His Work: Time and Self-Care in Black Middle-Class Couples at the University of Southern California.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Old City Publishing, Inc.
http://www.wcwonline.org/womensreview
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 8th Edition APA 6th Edition Chicago 17th Edition
Council, LuToya. "You Rise." The Women's Review of Books, vol. 36, no. 6, Nov.-Dec. 2019, p. 14+. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A606944656/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=989c4155. Accessed 6 July 2020.
QUOTE:"this lyrical, lightly told coming-of-age story is bound to satisfy."
Red at the Bone
By Jacqueline Woodson
Family Saga
Jacqueline Woodson, who is completing her stint as National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, returns to her beloved Brooklyn for her second novel for adults, Red at the Bone (Riverhead, $26, 9780525535270, audio/eBook available), which explores the effects of an unplanned pregnancy on an African American family.
The story opens in 2001 at a coming-of-age party at a Brooklyn brownstone. Sixteen and outfitted in her mother's lace dress with a matching corset, garters and stockings, Melody plans to enter the party to an instrumental version of Prince's "Nikki," much to her grandparents' discomfort.
But there's another catch to both the day and the dress. At 15, Melody's mother, Iris, was pregnant and unable to wear the carefully made dress. Iris' own coming-of-age birthday was left unmarked, and after her dismissal from private school, the family opted to move to another part of Brooklyn where they could also join a new church. But despite the shame and disruption of baby Melody, Iris was determined to move forward, ultimately getting her high school diploma, enrolling at Oberlin College and moving, almost permanently, out of Melody's life.
Over 21 brief chapters, Red at the Bone, which draws its title from the romantic feelings Iris has for another woman at Oberlin, moves backward and forward in time, examining the effect Melody's birth had on each character, from her disappointed but loving grandparents to her devoted father and his resolute yet fragile mother. Along the way, the reader learns more about the history of the family's losses, from 9/11 to the Tulsa Race Riots of 1912.
Kin and community have always been of primary concern for Woodson; her National Book Award-winning memoir, Brown Girl Dreaming, explored her own childhood transition from Ohio to South Carolina and then New York. Her books combine unique details of her characters' lives with the sounds, sights and especially music of their surroundings, creating stories that are both deeply personal and remarkably universal.
Though Red at the Bone lacks the cohesion of Woodson's previous work, this lyrical, lightly told coming-of-age story is bound to satisfy.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 8th Edition APA 6th Edition Chicago 17th Edition
Bufferd, Lauren. "Red at the Bone." BookPage, Sept. 2019, p. 20. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A596849509/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1d2a77f7. Accessed 6 July 2020.
QUOTE: In Woodson, at the height of her powers, readers hear the blues: "beneath that joy, such a sadness."
Woodson, Jacqueline RED AT THE BONE Riverhead (Adult Fiction) $26.00 9, 17 ISBN: 978-0-525-53527-0
Woodson sings a fresh song of Brooklyn, an aria to generations of an African American family.
National Book Award winner Woodson (Harbor Me, 2018, etc.) returns to her cherished Brooklyn, its "cardinals and flowers and bright-colored cars. Little girls with purple ribbons and old women with swollen ankles." For her latest coming-of-age story, Woodson opens in the voice of Melody, waiting on the interior stairs of her grandparents' brownstone. She's 16, making her debut, a "ritual of marking class and time and transition." She insists that the assembled musicians play Prince's risque "Darling Nikki" as she descends. Melody jabs at her mother, Iris, saying "It's Prince. And it's my ceremony and he's a genius so why are we even still talking about it? You already nixed the words. Let me at least have the music." Woodson famously nails the adolescent voice. But so, too, she burnishes all her characters' perspectives. Iris' sexual yearning for another girl at Oberlin College gives this novel its title: "She felt red at the bone--like there was something inside of her undone and bleeding." By then, Iris had all but abandoned toddler Melody and the toddler's father, Aubrey, in that ancestral brownstone to make her own way. In 21 lyrical chapters, readers hear from both of Iris' parents, who met at Morehouse, and Aubrey's mother, CathyMarie, who stretched the margarine and grape jelly sandwiches to see him grown. Woodson's ear for music--whether Walt Whitman's or A Tribe Called Quest's--is exhilarating, as is her eye for detail. Aubrey and little Melody, holding hands, listen to an old man whose "bottom dentures were loose in his mouth, moving in small circles as he spoke." The novel itself circles elegantly back to its beginning, Melody and Iris in 2001 for a brava finale, but not before braiding the 1921 Race Massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to the fires of 9/11. The thread is held by Iris' mother, Sabe, who hangs on through her fatal illness "a little while longer. Until Melody and Iris can figure each other out."
In Woodson, at the height of her powers, readers hear the blues: "beneath that joy, such a sadness."
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 8th Edition APA 6th Edition Chicago 17th Edition
"Woodson, Jacqueline: RED AT THE BONE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 July 2019. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A593064626/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1492fcd2. Accessed 6 July 2020.
QUOTE: Woodson's nuanced voice evokes the complexities of race, class, religion, and sexuality in fluid prose and a series of telling details. This is a wise, powerful, and compassionate novel.
* Red at the Bone
Jacqueline Woodson. Riverhead, $26 (208p) ISBN 978-0-525-53527-0
Woodson's beautifully imagined novel (her first novel for adults since 20l6's Another Brooklyn) explores the ways an unplanned pregnancy changes two families. The narrative opens in the spring of 2001, at the coming-of-age party that 16-year-old Melody's grandparents host for her at their Brooklyn brownstone. A family ritual adapted from cotillion tradition, the event ushers Melody into adulthood as an orchestra plays Prince and her "court" dances around her. Amid the festivity, Melody and her family--her unmarried parents, Iris and Aubrey, and her maternal grandparents, Sabe and Sammy "Po'Boy" Simmons, think of both past and future, delving into extended flashbacks that comprise most of the text. Sabe is proud of the education and affluence she has achieved, but she remains haunted by stories of her family's losses in the fires of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre. The discovery that her daughter, Iris, was pregnant at 15 filled her with shame, rage, and panic. After the birth of Melody, Iris, uninterested in marrying mail-room clerk Aubrey, pined for the freedom that her pregnancy curtailed. Leaving Melody to be raised by Aubrey, Sabe, and Po'Boy, she departed for Oberlin College in the early '90s and, later, to a Manhattan apartment that her daughter is invited to visit but not to see as home. Their relationship is strained as Melody dons the coming-out dress her mother would have worn if she hadn't been pregnant with Melody. Woodson's nuanced voice evokes the complexities of race, class, religion, and sexuality in fluid prose and a series of telling details. This is a wise, powerful, and compassionate novel. (Sept.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 8th Edition APA 6th Edition Chicago 17th Edition
"Red at the Bone." Publishers Weekly, vol. 266, no. 28, 15 July 2019, p. 51. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A593965734/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6df756c9. Accessed 6 July 2020.
QUOTE: will speak to young people's insecurities and fears while recognizing their courage in facing them." Harris added: "A timely tribute to the resilience of young people and to the power of human connection that often overrides our differences."
Harbor Me
by Jacqueline Woodson
Intermediate Paulsen/Penguin 179 pp. g
8/18 978-0-399-25252-5 $17.99
One day, Ms. Laverne gathers her small class of fifth and sixth graders and walks them over to the old art room, where she invites them to talk to one another--without her. Every Friday at two o'clock, narrator Haley and her classmates sit in a circle during the last hour of the school day to talk about whatever they want. At first, the six students are skeptical and question Ms. Laverne's judgment in leaving them alone--in pushing them "from the Familiar to the Unfamiliar"--but they soon realize the gift that she has offered them. While grappling with challenging issues of immigration, racism, incarceration, grief, and loss, they also explore deep issues of identity, community, family, change, and forgiveness. The power of remembrance is also an important theme, with Haley offering her voice recorder as a medium to collect her classmates' stories and voices. As the school year unfolds, the safety and sanctity of their space deepens, as do their friendships. Woodson's (Brown Girl Dreaming, rev. 9/14) latest will speak to young people's insecurities and fears while recognizing their courage in facing them, and her craft as a weaver of words and imagery is evident on every page. A timely tribute to the resilience of young people and to the power of human connection that often overrides our differences.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The Horn Book, Inc.. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Sources, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.hbook.com/magazine/default.asp
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 8th Edition APA 6th Edition Chicago 17th Edition
Harris, Monique. "Harbor Me." The Horn Book Magazine, vol. 94, no. 6, Nov.-Dec. 2018, p. 94. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A560014889/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=aa06a662. Accessed 6 July 2020.
QUOTE: "celebrates all that is essential and good for humanity--compassion, understanding, security, and freedom--in [a] touching novel about six children with special needs," "Showing how America's political and social issues affect children on a daily basis, this novel will leave an indelible mark on readers' minds."
Harbor Me
Jacqueline Woodson. Penguin/Paulsen, $17.99 (192p) ISBN 978-0-399-25252-5
Woodson (Brown Girl Dreaming) celebrates all that is essential and good for humanity--compassion, understanding, security, and freedom--in this touching novel about six children with special needs. Sixth-grader Haley and her best friend, Holly, don't know much about their four male classmates when they are placed in a self-contained classroom. They soon discover the things that they do and do not have in common when, on Friday afternoons, their teacher takes them to ARTT (a room to talk). Here, without adult supervision, the class can have conversations about anything. Usually the students use the time to unburden themselves of problems ranging from a parent's deportation to bullying in the schoolyard. Haley is the last to spill her secrets, about her mother's death and why her father is in prison, and afterwards she is rewarded with a feeling of lightness, "like so many bricks had been lifted off me," she says. Woodson's skills as poet and master storyteller shine brightly here as she economically uses language to express emotion and delve into the hearts of her characters. Showing how America's political and social issues affect children on a daily basis, this novel will leave an indelible mark on readers' minds. Ages 10-up.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 8th Edition APA 6th Edition Chicago 17th Edition
"Harbor Me." Publishers Weekly, vol. 265, no. 49, 27 Nov. 2018, p. 46+. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A564607262/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=57e584d1. Accessed 6 July 2020.
QUOTE: "This story, told with exquisite language and clarity of narrative, is both heartbreaking and hopeful. An extraordinary and timely piece of writing."
Woodson, Jacqueline HARBOR ME Nancy Paulsen Books (Children's Fiction) $17.99 8, 28 ISBN: 978-0-399-25252-5
Just before she begins seventh grade, Haley tells the story of the previous school year, when she and five other students from an experimental classroom were brought together.
Each has been bullied or teased about their difficulties in school, and several face real challenges at home. Haley is biracial and cared for by her white uncle due to the death of her African-American mother and her white father's incarceration. Esteban, of Dominican heritage, is coping with his father's detention by ICE and the possible fracturing of his family. It is also a time when Amari learns from his dad that he can no longer play with toy guns because he is a boy of color. This reveals the divide between them and their white classmate, Ashton. "It's not fair that you're a boy and Ashton's a boy and he can do something you can't do anymore. That's not freedom," Haley says. They support one another, something Haley needs as she prepares for her father's return from prison and her uncle's decision to move away. Woodson delivers a powerful tale of community and mutual growth. The bond they develop is palpable. Haley's recorder is both an important plot element and a metaphor for the power of voice and story. The characters ring true as they discuss issues both personal and global. This story, told with exquisite language and clarity of narrative, is both heartbreaking and hopeful.
An extraordinary and timely piece of writing. (Fiction. 10-14)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 8th Edition APA 6th Edition Chicago 17th Edition
"Woodson, Jacqueline: HARBOR ME." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2018. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A544638014/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=06e4ce5c. Accessed 6 July 2020.
QUOTE: "This reassuring, lyrical book feels like a big hug from a wise aunt as she imparts the wisdom of the world in order to calm trepidatious young children. ... A must-have book about the power of one's voice and the friendships that emerge when you are yourself."
Woodson, Jacqueline THE DAY YOU BEGIN Nancy Paulsen Books (Children's Fiction) $18.99 8, 28 ISBN: 978-0-399-24653-1
School-age children encounter and overcome feelings of difference from their peers in the latest picture book from Woodson.
This nonlinear story centers on Angelina, with big curly hair and brown skin, as she begins the school year with a class share-out of summer travels. Text and illustrations effectively work together to convey her feelings of otherness as she reflects on her own summer spent at home: "What good is this / when others were flying," she ponders while leaning out her city window forlornly watching birds fly past to seemingly faraway places. Lopez's incorporation of a ruler for a door, table, and tree into the illustrations creatively extends the metaphor of measuring up to others. Three other children--Rigoberto, a recent immigrant from Venezuela; a presumably Korean girl with her "too strange" lunch of kimchi, meat, and rice; and a lonely white boy in what seems to be a suburb--experience more-direct teasing for their outsider status. A bright jewel-toned palette and clever details, including a literal reflection of a better future, reveal hope and pride in spite of the taunting. This reassuring, lyrical book feels like a big hug from a wise aunt as she imparts the wisdom of the world in order to calm trepidatious young children: One of these things is not like the other, and that is actually what makes all the difference.
A must-have book about the power of one's voice and the friendships that emerge when you are yourself. (Picture book. 4-8)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 8th Edition APA 6th Edition Chicago 17th Edition
"Woodson, Jacqueline: THE DAY YOU BEGIN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2018. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A544638021/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=28176b5d. Accessed 6 July 2020.
QUOTE: "Woodson's gentle, lilting story and Lopez's artistry create a stirring portrait of the courage it takes to be oneself,"
The Day You Begin
Jacqueline Woodson, illus. by Rafael Lopez. Penguin/Paulsen, $18.99 (32p)
ISBN 978-0-399-24653-1
Woodson (Brown Girl Dreaming) imagines being "an only" in the classroom--what it's like to be the only one with an accent ("No one understands the way words curl from your mouth"), the only one who stayed home during summer vacation ("What good is this/ when other students were flying/ and sailing"), the only one whose lunch box is filled with food "too strange or too unfamiliar for others to love as you do." Without prescribing sympathy, Woodson's poetic lines give power to each child's experience. She describes the moment when the girl who didn't go on vacation speaks her truth, her "voice stronger than it was a minute ago." She has cared for her sister all summer, she tells her classmates, reading and telling stories: "Even though we were right on our block it was like/ we got to go EVERYWHERE." And "all at once" in the seconds after sharing one's story, something shifts, common ground is revealed, and "the world opens itself up a little wider/ to make some space for you." Lopez (Drum Dream Girl) paints the book's array of children as students in the same classroom; patterns and colors on the children's clothing and the growing things around them fill the spreads with life. Woodson's gentle, lilting story and Lopez's artistry create a stirring portrait of the courage it takes to be oneself: "There will be times when you walk into a room and no one there is quite like you until the day you begin/ to share your stories." Ages 5-8. Author's agent: Kathleen Nishimoto, William Morris Endeavor. Illustrator's agent: Stefanie Von Borstel, Full Circle. (Aug.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 8th Edition APA 6th Edition Chicago 17th Edition
"The Day You Begin." Publishers Weekly, vol. 265, no. 24, 11 June 2018, p. 66. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A542967385/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=04a14c03. Accessed 6 July 2020.
Harbor Me
Jacqueline Woodson. Penguin/Paulsen, $17.99 (192p) ISBN 978-0-399-25252-5
Woodson (Brown Girl Dreaming) celebrates all that is essential and good for humanity--compassion, understanding, security, and freedom--in this touching novel about six children with special needs. Sixth-grader Haley and her best friend, Holly, don't know much about their four male classmates when they are placed in a self-contained classroom. They soon discover the things that they do and do not have in common when, on Friday afternoons, their teacher takes them to ARTT (a room to talk). Here, without adult supervision, the class can have conversations about anything. Usually the students use the time to unburden themselves of problems ranging from a parent's deportation to bullying in the schoolyard. Haley is the last to spill her secrets, about her mother's death and why her father is in prison, and afterwards she is rewarded with a feeling of lightness, "like so many bricks had been lifted off me," she says. Woodson's skills as poet and master storyteller shine brightly here as she economically uses language to express emotion and delve into the hearts of her characters. Showing how America's political and social issues affect children on a daily basis, this novel will leave an indelible mark on readers' minds. Ages 10--up. (Aug.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 8th Edition APA 6th Edition Chicago 17th Edition
"Harbor Me." Publishers Weekly, vol. 265, no. 21, 21 May 2018, p. 74. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A541012689/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6d78320e. Accessed 6 July 2020.
QUOTE: Woodson’s haunting novel, a 16-year-old girl’s coming-of-age party prompts an avalanche of memories for her middle-class African American family. ... There is an abundance of angst over class, gender and race subtly woven into this beguilingly slim novel."
Fiction
Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson review – heartbreak and joy
The repercussions of a teenage pregnancy are felt down the generations of an African American family
Regina Porter
Sat 15 Feb 2020 07.30 GMTLast modified on Mon 17 Feb 2020 17.46 GMT
Shares
50
‘Woodson explores the risks of youth, love and desire.
Woodson explores the risks of youth, love and desire. Photograph: Ali Smith/The Guardian
In US author Jacqueline Woodson’s haunting novel, a 16-year-old girl’s coming-of-age party prompts an avalanche of memories for her middle-class African American family. Melody is smart, pretty, private school privileged and much adored by her father, Aubrey, and proud grandparents, Sabe and Po’Boy. Melody is also the product of a teenage pregnancy that has left her estranged from her mother, Iris, who chose the distance of college in Ohio over nappies, baby bottles and the domesticity of her parents’ Brooklyn brownstone.
The baby bump deprived Iris of her own introduction into society: now she must look on as her daughter descends the stairs wearing the white dress she was not permitted to wear and is serenaded by an orchestra playing an instrumental version of Prince’s “Darling Nikki”. On a spring day in 2001, while Melody and Malcolm, her childhood friend and date, swirl around the dance floor, so do the memories for the teenager and the key players in her life. Melody can’t help but observe that her relationship with her mother is full of regrets and thorns. “That afternoon, the years that separated us could have been fifty – Iris standing at the bottom of the stairs watching me. Me looking away from her. Where was I looking? At my father? My grandparents? At anything. At anyone. But her.”
Advertisement
There is an abundance of angst over class, gender and race subtly woven into this beguilingly slim novel. Woodson frames each chapter from the point of view of a different character, and the result is a narrative about an individual family that takes on communal urgency and power. She shows her readers how elliptical and obsessive human memory is. The precarious dance between intelligence and emotions makes it difficult to unravel the whole truth because no two characters experience the past in the same way. The past, however, informs their present.
In many ways, Red at the Bone is Iris’s story – that of a young woman raised for respectability who is unable to follow middle-class norms. Iris is a modern version of Janie in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God or Sula in Toni Morrison’s eponymous novel. At one point, Iris questions the nature of Melody’s relationship with Malcolm. She intuits that her daughter’s friend is gay. This recognition leads us to Iris’s own past and a love affair with another woman during her sophomore year at college. During a moment of sexual arousal, breast milk seeps from her body and she is forced to reveal to her girlfriend that she has a daughter (Melody) and boyfriend (Aubrey) waiting for her in Brooklyn. The reality dawns on Iris that her two lives will never blend, and she goes on to pour herself into her education and career. (How lovely, by the way, to see feminist writer bell hooks’s 1981 book Ain’t I a Woman mentioned, one of many examples of character- and world-building layered throughout Red at the Bone.)
Woodson captures how important status is for African Americans determined to pull themselves up from poverty
But it’s not only Iris’s story: Melody’s father has his say too. Following an unstable childhood, Aubrey loves his baby girl and closes rank with Iris’s parents to give Melody a loving home during Iris’s prolonged absences. (Not every man can live with his in-laws.) Woodson captures how important status is for African Americans determined to pull themselves up from poverty and racial oppression. Upward mobility is fragile in black communities and the scrutiny hard when someone – in this case Iris – falls short of the family’s good name and potential. Sabe also carries the memory of her family’s escape from the Tulsa race massacre of 1921, along with a rock-solid belief that nothing but pure gold can keep black folk safe.
Sign up for Bookmarks: discover new books in our weekly email
Read more
Woodson takes us back to when Sabe and Po’Boy first meet in Atlanta, Georgia, reflecting how many educated, middle-class men and women came to find lifelong partners at traditionally all‑black universities and colleges, where they were largely free from the white gaze. She shows how families pass down traumatic memories and reinvent themselves despite major setbacks. Those setbacks can become a source of joy or celebration: Po’Boy loves his grandchild in the same way he loved the daughter whose pregnancy broke his heart.
Advertisement
Black women and their sexuality – what is projected on to it; its weight, beauty and ease – are at the heart of Red at the Bone. Woodson seems to understand that there has never been a way for youth or love or desire to play it safe. A young girl’s sexuality is hers to discover, and not her parents’, nor her lovers’, to assume or take away. It is the mystery that keeps unravelling, like blood, truth and memory.
• Regina Porter’s The Travelers is published by Jonathan Cape. Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson is published by W&N (RRP £14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.
QUOTE: "Red at the Bone should win Woodson plenty of new fans. It reads like poetry and drama, a cry from the heart that often cuts close to the bone. The narrative nimbly jumps around in time and shifts points of view among five characters who span three generations."
'Red At The Bone' Cuts Close To The Bone
September 17, 201910:00 AM ET
HELLER MCALPIN
Red at the Bone
Red at the Bone
by Jacqueline Woodson
Hardcover, 176 pagespurchase
Jacqueline Woodson begins her powerful new novel audaciously, with the word "But." Well, there are no buts about this writer's talent.
Red at the Bone follows Woodson's National Book Award-winning memoir, Brown Girl Dreaming, and her critically acclaimed novel Another Brooklyn, which in turn followed more than two dozen popular young adult novels, several of which received Newbery awards. With this new novel for adults, Woodson continues her sensitive exploration of what it means to be a black girl in America.
What we have here is an exquisitely wrought tale of two urban black families — one headed by a prosperous, devoted couple, the other by a struggling single mother — whose lives become permanently intertwined when their only children conceive a child in their teens. Perfect for the legions of young women who have graduated from Woodson's middle grade and adolescent fiction, this compact novel focuses on the decisions we make in life, often under duress, or before we can fully understand their consequences.
Red at the Bone should win Woodson plenty of new fans. It reads like poetry and drama, a cry from the heart that often cuts close to the bone. The narrative nimbly jumps around in time and shifts points of view among five characters who span three generations — the unplanned child of that high school fling and her parents and grandparents — as it builds toward its moving climax. In less than 200 sparsely filled pages, this book manages to encompass issues of class, education, ambition, racial prejudice, sexual desire and orientation, identity, mother-daughter relationships, parenthood and loss — yet never feels like a checklist of Important Issues.
Sign Up For The Books Newsletter
Get book recommendations, reviews, author interviews and more, sent weekly.
E-mail address
What's your email?
By subscribing, you agree to NPR's terms of use and privacy policy. NPR may share your name and email address with your NPR station. See Details. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Woodson signals with a wonderful epigram that life's vicissitudes are in her sights: "Bro, how you doing? You holding on?" one old man asks another. "Man, you know how it goes. One day chicken. Next day bone," the second answers.
Related NPR Stories
Jacqueline Woodson's New Novel For Adults Has Its Roots In Adolescence
AUTHOR INTERVIEWS
Jacqueline Woodson's New Novel For Adults Has Its Roots In Adolescence
Where Author Jacqueline Woodson Would Like To Take Young People's Literature In 2018
The novel begins on a chicken day, when Melody, the daughter of those two hapless teens, is celebrating her 16th birthday at her grandparents' Brooklyn townhouse: "But that afternoon there was an orchestra playing. Music filling the brownstone," she tells us. This deft opener manages to paint the festive scene while immediately putting us on alert with that qualifier, "But": Things either weren't always so joyous or soon won't be.
Chicken bones are scattered through the novel. Woodson's title refers most literally to the unappealing, undercooked chicken flesh close to the bone that Melody is surprised to see the white girls at her private school eating. But it's also a potent expression of raw emotions that aren't easily digested. When Melody's mother, Iris, finally experiences real passion at college with a surprising partner, she's blindsided by its force: "She felt red at the bone — like there was something inside of her undone and bleeding."
There isn't a character in this book you don't come to care about, even when you question their choices. Iris is sure to provoke discussion: At 15, to her parents' dismay, she was adamant about keeping the baby growing inside her, even though she "couldn't see a future" with Aubrey, "someone who only knew margarine." But what young Iris failed to recognize was "that on the other side of pregnancy there was Motherhood." Sparked by Aubrey's mother — "the last thing I want my grandchild's mother to be is a high school dropout" — she throws herself into her studies and takes off for college as soon as she can, leaving Aubrey and her daughter living with her parents. "She had outgrown Brooklyn and Aubrey and even Melody. Was that cruel?" Iris asks.
There isn't a character in this book you don't come to care about, even when you question their choices.
Yes, it was cruel, we learn from Aubrey and Melody, who never get over Iris' rejection. What's interesting is how Woodson inverts the scenario of the pregnant teen who is abandoned by her baby's father, fails to finish high school and slides into a life of poverty. Instead, far from letting pregnancy derail her, Iris reclaims her classes and her sense of worth, while Melody's father is the one who sticks around to raise the child, a devoted dad who decides he doesn't need a college degree or fancy job.
Woodson's language is beautiful throughout Red at the Bone, but it positively soars in the sections written from Iris' mother's point of view. Readers mourning the death of Toni Morrison will find comfort in Sabe's magnificent cadences as she rues her daughter's teen pregnancy, which flies in the face of the lessons her mama ingrained in her from the Tulsa race riots of 1921 — the massacre by whites that drove her family north and taught them to vigilantly safeguard their social and economic gains. This is just a taste of her despair:
But when your child shows up with a belly and she's not even full grown yet, you think for a minute that all those blocks of gold don't mean a damn thing out in the world if you haven't even taught your own child how to stay pure. How to hold on. How to grow into womanhood right. You cry into the night until your throat is raw and there's not another heave left inside of you. Not another drop of water left for your body to squeeze out. Not enough ways left to curse God and yourself.
But then, this fierce family defender says, "You rise. You rise."
With Red at the Bone, Jacqueline Woodson has indeed risen — even further into the ranks of great literature.