Woodson, Jacqueline
This year, Jacqueline Woodson added a MacArthur Fellowship to her impressive list of awards and honors. The Fellowship, informally called a “Genius Grant,” is designed to recognize exceptionally creative individuals and empower them to continue their work. Over the last thirty years, Woodson has written fiction, poetry, and informational books, including titles for all age groups, from young children through adults. She received the prestigious MacArthur grant for “[r]edefining children’s and young adult literature to encompass more complex issues and reflect the lives of Black children, teenagers, and families.”
Woodson’s storytelling explores these complex issues through the eyes of diverse, sensitively drawn characters. Her most recent novel, Before the Ever After (2020), focuses on CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy), or brain damage resulting from head trauma. Set in the time before the connection between CTE and football was fully understood, the story is evocatively told in verse from the point of view of ZJ, whose beloved father Zachariah is a famous football star. ZJ and his family must find a way to cope with loss and change, as Zachariah begins to suffer from CTE.
Why this topic? “I’d seen the damage done and hadn’t seen it written about. Football is a complicated and beautiful game. I always say I write because I have questions, not answers, and writing Before the Ever After helped me get at the heart of some of what I was grappling with around what happens to the bodies involved in the game, about what it means to show up, to be a good dad, to be a good son, to be a family.”
Woodson also used verse to tell her own story in Brown Girl Dreaming (2014). This powerful memoir about growing up in South Carolina and Brooklyn won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, among other honors. Is she surprised at the enthusiastic reception for her very personal memoir? “Every day! I struggled so with the question of ‘Will anyone but me be interested in this book?!’ I was and still am stunned at its reception. And grateful.”
When asked which of her books resonates as much today as it did when it was first published, Woodson has a ready answer: “If You Come Softly, hands down. I mean, I hope they all resonate, but looking at what we’re dealing with today and how a book I wrote back in the ’90s spoke to this moment, it is definitely the first one that comes to mind.” In this young adult novel, a Black boy and White girl fall in love, only to have their story cut short by a senseless police shooting. The sequel, Behind You (2004), follows the book’s characters as they face life after the shooting. In 2018, in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement, Penguin Random House highlighted the novel’s continuing relevance by publishing a 20th Anniversary Edition, with a new preface by the author.
Woodson describes her path to becoming a writer in one word: “writing.” For her, the process is essentially the same, whether she’s writing a picture book or an adult novel. “I don’t truly know how the process differs—writing is writing. The voices are different. The tone. But that’s the case book to book no matter what audience I’m writing for. Of course the adult books feature older characters as protagonists.” She does “A LOT” of self-editing as she goes along, and editors play an important role in the process as well. “My editors have always been great. They see where I’m trying to go and ask the questions that help me get there.”
What’s next? Audiences of all ages will continue to hear from Jacqueline Woodson. A new picture book is coming out soon, and she’s at work on a middle grade book and a nonfiction title for adults. As for ventures into other media, she recently completed a screenplay for her adult novel Red at the Bone (2019), as well as a pilot for a TV series based on Behind You.
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