A biography for Jacqueline Woodsonhasn’t been written yet.
“Until I was about 13, Manhattan had been a world seen from its edges.”
“Friendship is such an important thing to me, and I feel like the people who I love and help keep me whole - I can't imagine a life without them.”
“Y'all know how much I love you? "Infinity and back again," I say the way I've said it a million times. And then, daddy says to me, "go on and add a little bit more to that.”
“When there are many worldsyou can choose the oneyou walk into each day.”
“In all my childhood, I never heard my grandparents say that anything shocked or surprised them. They knew what their country was capable of.”
“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.'”
“Both racism and homophobia come from a sense of the presumed and the unknown.”
“I have a short attention span, so when one book isn't working out, I just work on another.”
“In the family, writing wasn't anything anyone understood - being a writer in the real world? How could it be? We didn't have those mirrors.”
“Who hasn't walked through a life of small tragedies?”
“I'm usually working on several things at once. If I get bored with one, I can go on to another. That way, I never get stuck.”
“I don't want anyone to walk through the world feeling invisible ever again.”
“To be poet laureate is to try to spread the love and the accessibility of poetry to young people.”
“I love how much love there is in the world of young adult and children's literature.”
“I love the physical act of writing as well as how I grow which each situation I put on the page.”
“Childhood, young adulthood is fluid. And it's very easy to get labeled very young and have to carry something through your childhood and into your adulthood that is not necessarily who you are.”
“I deeply believe in many Christian values: love people; do the right thing; know that there's good in everyone, that God's looking out for all of us.”
“I realized if I didn't start talking to my relatives, asking questions, thinking back to my own beginnings, there would come a time when those people wouldn't be around to help me look back and remember.”
“I read a lot of the books that I love again and again and again and try to understand how the writer did it.”
“'Another Brooklyn' came to me in this kind of dreamlike series of vignettes.”