Jacqueline Woodson

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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. Source  

reading

I am not my sister.

Words from the books curl around each other

make little sense

until

I read them again

and again, the story

settling into memory.  Too slow

the teacher says.

Read faster.

Too babyish, the teacher says.

Read older.

But I don’t want to read faster or older or

any way else that might

make the story disappear too quickly

from where it’s settling

inside my brain,

slowly becoming

a part of me.

A story I will remember

long after I’ve read it for the second,

third, tenth,

hundredth time.

Published:

2014

Length:

Shorty

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2021

2024

Themes:

Education & Learning

Literary Devices:

Dialogue

conversation between two or more people as a feature of a book, play, or movie

Personification

the attribution of human qualities to a non-human thing

Repetition

a recurrence of the same word or phrase two or more times