Jacqueline Woodson

“As a person of color, as a woman, as a body moving through this particular space in time, I realize the streets of New York tell the story of resistance, an African-American history of brill...”

“My mother was a single mom whose days were spent as a customer service rep at Con Edison in downtown Brooklyn.”

“In writing 'Another Brooklyn,' I had to imagine what happens when friendships dissolve.”

“'Another Brooklyn' came to me in this kind of dreamlike series of vignettes.”

“Even after Jim Crow was supposed to not be a part of the South anymore, there were still ways in which you couldn't get away from it. And I think once I got to Brooklyn, there was this freed...”

“As a child in South Carolina, I spent summers like so many children - sitting on my grandparents' back porch with my siblings, spitting watermelon seeds into the garden or, even worse, swall...”

“I think when I was a young person, there was just kind of - there was very little dialogue about it. And there was just kind of one way to be gay, right? You saw very effeminate guys. You sa...”

“I still love Carson McCullers and Raymond Carver and Toni Morrison and James Baldwin.”

“I feel like I am walking in some amazing footsteps of writers who have come before me, like S.E. Hinton, Walter Dean Myers, Christopher Paul Curtis, Richard Peck and Kate DiCamillo, who I lo...”

“I'm fascinated by adult women who don't have close friends and how that could come to be. I think when you're a kid, the relationships are so intimate, and you're so connected to your girls,...”

“The strength of my mother is something I didn't pay attention to for so long. Here she was, this single mom, who was part of the Great Migration, who was part of a Jim Crow south, who said,...”

“The South was very segregated. I mean, all through my childhood, long after Jim Crow was supposed to not be in existence, it was still a very segregated South.”

“In the daytime, I was expected to be the straight-A student. I was expected to be college bound. I was expected to be a great big sister. And then at night, I was just a club kid.”

“What I write comes from a place of deep love, and a deep understanding of all kinds of otherness.”

“I would have written 'Brown Girl Dreaming' if no one had ever wanted to buy it, if it went nowhere but inside a desk drawer that my own children pulled out one day to find a tool for surviva...”

“Who are you without your girls? I truly believe that. Who are you without the people who help you make sense of the misogyny, the racism, the economic struggle, all of it? You need those peo...”

“Until I was about 13, Manhattan had been a world seen from its edges.”

“By the time I was in fifth grade, I was dreaming of the Pulitzer Prize.”

“There was something about telling the lie-story and seeing your friends' eyes grow wide with wonder. Of course I got in trouble for lying, but I didn't stop until fifth grade.”

“I didn't have any idea of what I was getting into by going away to college. And I was scared. I was scared of failing. I was scared of it not being for me because I was going to be one of th...”