Jacqueline Woodson

In a grand ballroom at the American Library Association’s midwinter meeting in January, scores of librarians stood up and cheered—clapping and grinning like fans at a Mary J. Blige concert. The object of their affection? Jacqueline Woodson, the author of more than 20 books for children and teens. Just moments earlier, the 42-year-old writer had been named the winner of this year’s Margaret A. Edwards Award, and the audience was thrilled with the choice. The award, overseen by the Young Adult Library Services Association and sponsored by School Library Journal, honors an author’s lifetime contributions to young people’s literature.

Since her first book, Last Summer with Maizon, appeared in 1990, Woodson’s works have attracted legions of fans. Her spare, lyrical novels tackle some of society’s thorniest issues, including sexual abuse; interracial relationships; sexual identity; and the sad effects of poverty, prejudice, and violence. Yet Woodson’s stories are never bleak. Indeed, her books are a celebration of the resiliency of young people. In honoring Woodson’s work, the Edwards committee cited five of her novels: I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This (1994) and its sequel, Lena (1998, all Delacorte); From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun (Scholastic, 1995); If You Come Softly (1998); and Miracle’s Boys (2000, both Putnam), the Coretta Scott King Award–winning tale of three young, parentless brothers, which was made into a TV miniseries.

As a girl, Woodson used to tell people that she was going to be a teacher, lawyer, or hairdresser. But her actions told a different tale. “I wrote on everything and everywhere,” she says on her Web site (www.jacquelinewoodson.com). “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.”

These days, Woodson lives in Brooklyn with her partner and her four-year-old daughter, Toshi (named after her godmother, super-cool singer Toshi Reagon). We spoke to Woodson about how she decided to write for young people and why she’s attracted to such dicey topics.

What were you like as a child?

I grew up in a [Brooklyn] neighborhood known as Bushwick. While it’s a middle-class neighborhood now, when I was growing up it was working-class poor. Our neighborhood was predominantly black and Latino. I grew up speaking Spanish and English and identifying with both the Latino and African-American cultures. I was happy. I had friends I adored. I was a tomboy, and I was the fastest kid on my block. I was skinny. Like many kids, we were shipped down south in the summer—to my grandmother’s house in Greenville, SC. Then, once my grandmother moved to New York City after my grandfather’s death, we’d head down south with her to visit relatives. So the South is very much a part of my roots as well.

Do you remember the first story you wrote?

The first “book” I wrote was a collection of poems about butterflies. I was seven at the time and carried the book around in my back pocket—showing it to anyone who showed any interest. For as long as I can remember, I’ve said I wanted to be a writer. I just loved writing. I think people thought it odd and unrealistic. But my friends loved my poetry and often asked me to write love letters and poems for them.

What did you read when you were a teen?

My teachers would tell you that I was not a reader who read stuff that was challenging. I read stuff that excited me and that made me feel like I was right in the story. But I got really frustrated if I was reading a book and I came across a word I didn’t know. Because it broke the dream of the fiction for me, and I had to remember that I was in a book—that I wasn’t in the real world—and I had to stop and look up that word. So I tended to go for books that were maybe written for younger people. I always read realistic fiction and books that were very character driven. I was the kind of reader that believed the story was real. No one could tell me that the author had pulled the story out of their head and it was not tethered to real life in any way.

And I read a lot. I read the same books again and again. I remember by the time I was about 14, I had read [Toni Morrison’s] The Bluest Eye seven or eight times. When you think of The Bluest Eye in terms of what the story is trying to say and what the moral issues are, someone would probably say: “You shouldn’t be reading that book when you’re 10 years old.” But the book didn’t have a lot of hard words in it. The language was a language I understood, because the people were people of color who were coming from underserved communities, who were from the South and the Midwest.

Talk about your development as a writer.

I wrote all the time. I read all the time. I studied the novels of [James] Baldwin and [Toni] Morrison and [Alice] Walker. I majored in English in college and minored in British literature [at Adelphi University]. But I feel like this was all just a backdrop for something bigger, something I’m just beginning to understand. I wrote because I loved writing and the power of writing. I wrote because there were people in my head saying stuff, and I wanted to listen and understand. Call it madness. Call it a gift. Call it whatever society needs to call it to understand it. I watched the world, and the world was big and amazing and attainable when I wrote.

When did you decide to write for young adults?

I didn’t know that that was what I was going to be doing. When I wrote Last Summer with Maizon, I was working at Kirchoff/Wolberg, which is a book packager, and there was an agent there and she read it and said, “You know, this is a children’s book.” I had no clue what she was talking about. Then I took a class on writing for children, and I realized that every time I started telling a story, the protagonist was a young person. So I feel like [writing for young adults] chose me.

I knew I wanted to write about things that were important to me. I wanted to write about places that were familiar. I wanted to put the people I loved on the page some way and make them feel powerful. I wanted to feel powerful myself. And the way that those stories came into the world were through the mouths and the eyes and the ears of young people.

I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This, which explores the relationship between a middle-class black girl and a poor white girl, does something that few young adult books have done—it addresses class and race issues. Why did you decide to tackle such thorny issues?

You know, I feel the issues find me. When I started writing I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This, I knew I wanted to write about friendship. And I knew, at some point, that it was going to be across lines of race. I didn’t realize economic class was going to come into it until later. When I started thinking about economic class, I started thinking about what I had grown up seeing in the pages—and that was that blacks were always poor; whites were always wealthy; and the whites were always rescuing the blacks.

I came from a single mom [household] in an underserved community. I came from a world that, in some ways, was represented on the pages but not truthfully. So I decided I wanted to make Marie’s family a middle-class family. And then when Lena came into the story, I knew that she was going to be poor. I knew that [the story] was new; it was surprising; it wasn’t something people had seen on the page a lot.

Have you received a lot of flack because Lena is sexually abused by her father?

I have. But I haven’t always believed that that’s what the criticism is about. I feel like people were more outraged at Lena being poor and white than they were about the sexual abuse. And I feel like in the dialogues I’ve had with people—and with predominantly white people, unfortunately—about that book, there’s an undercurrent of “Why did you do this?” There are other books that deal with these things that people are more open to. But I think there was something about the white girl being the one that is poor that really made people upset.

In If You Come Softly, Jeremiah, the son of a prominent African-American film director, and Ellie, the daughter of a Jewish physician who lives on New York’s Upper West Side, fall unexpectedly in love. I remember being at a Best Books for Young Adults teen session in Washington, DC, and the kids just rose up in unison and talked about how much the book meant to them. What does their reaction say about our society?

Well, the opposite of teens rising up in unison: Do you remember how angry adults were about that book?

Yeah, I do. Some were incensed over its ending—when Jeremiah is shot and killed by the police, simply because he’s running through Central Park and is mistaken for another young black man.

Adults were out of their minds with outrage about it: How dare you write this? How dare you do this? How dare you kill off that boy? That doesn’t happen any more—black people aren’t getting shot. Then a month later, Amadou Diallo was killed.

I actually grew up with my mom saying, “Don’t run in a white neighborhood.” So I feel like [that incident] says that we still have so far to come. We still have so much work to do. And part of that work is getting people to believe that our world has not changed a whole, whole lot. We can look at moments of “No, we don’t have to ride in the back of the bus anymore”; “No, we don’t have to step off the sidewalk when a white person is passing”; “No, we’re not getting hung from magnolia trees.” But there was just an article in the New York Times about how black men are doing poorly in our society and are still stigmatized.

I think that that’s the beauty of young people: they’re standing up and saying, “This book really spoke to me and really made me think and really made me sad.” And adults are saying, “How dare you? You made me angry, and I don’t want to feel that. So, as a result, I’m not going to believe you.”

Your novels—particularly Miracle’s Boys—feature some of the most economical and lyrical language I’ve ever read. You never seem to waste a word.

I talk so much in real life maybe by the time I sit down to write, I’ve used up all the words. [She laughs.] But I also read a lot of poetry. And I also feel like a lot of my books have such an urgency to them. When there is that urgency, there isn’t a lot of room for language. So you get to that point as quickly as you can. Also, I’m the kind of reader who doesn’t like books that are very wordy. I’m like, OK, get rid of all the adjectives and just tell me what you’re trying to say. So my writing is reflective of that. When I get stuck, I go to the poetry and I read some pieces that really make me slow down and make me more thoughtful and less verbose.

What do you hear from teen readers?

The most recent thing was a girl writing to say, “I love Miracle’s Boys. I love the book, and I love the movie. Can you send me Julito McCullum’s phone number?” (One of the actors from the TV miniseries.) I get everything from what made you write the book to how do I get started writing to how do you get those characters on a page to what do you do if your best friend is gay—or I was in love with a black guy and my mom said I couldn’t see him any more, so I know what you’re talking about. They just open their hearts and put it on the page. One kid said, “I have a book that I want to write and I would love for you to help me write it.” He’s like, “I think e-mail is a waste of time, so can you give me your IM address and we could IM each other?”

It’s an amazing accomplishment to win the Margaret A. Edwards Award. But even before that, you were considered one of today’s top YA writers.

I didn’t know that until you said it. I knew people recognized my work and I knew that people had said really nice things about me. But I really don’t have a sense of myself in this field. I guess that’s a healthy thing because you don’t want to become complacent, and you don’t want to get egomaniacal.

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. But at the same time, I feel like it’s part of a continuum: I’m going to do the work so that someone else coming behind me can do the work and someone else coming behind them can do the work. Individually, the work will get a little easier and eventually, the work might not be necessary—I mean the work of being able to articulate what our world needs to do.