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I love how much love there is in the world of young adult and children's literature.
Jacqueline Woodson
In the midst of observing the world and coming to consciousness, I was becoming a writer, and what I wanted to put on the page were the stories of people who looked like me.
To be poet laureate is to try to spread the love and the accessibility of poetry to young people.
Both racism and homophobia come from a sense of the presumed and the unknown.
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, 'I'm getting my kids out of here. I'm creating opportunities for these young people by any means necessary.'
I write for whoever needs to read it.
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 survival, a symbol of how strong we are and how much we've come through.
Memory doesn't come as a straight narrative. It comes in small moments with all this white space.
I don't believe there are 'struggling' readers, 'advanced' readers, or 'non' readers.
In young adult novels and children's books, you stay in moment. The story goes through a school year or a weekend. You never get a sense of a future self because the young person has not lived that yet.
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.
My mom was a big fan of Al Green... James Brown we weren't allowed to listen to, so of course I knew James Brown.
I'm usually working either on a picture book and a young adult book, or a middle grade book and a young adult book. When I get bored with one, I move to the other, and then I go back.
I'm inspired by questions I have that I try to figure out the answers to through my writing.
With my writing, I try to do stuff I have not done before. Each time I sit down, I want to have a new experience, and by extension, I want my readers to have a different experience.
Told a lot of stories as a child. Not 'Once upon a time' stories but, basically, outright lies. I loved lying and getting away with it!
Everything I write, I read aloud. It has to sound a certain way and look a certain way on page.
'Brown Girl Dreaming' was a book I had a lot of doubts about - mainly, would this story be meaningful to anyone besides me? My editor, Nancy Paulsen, kept assuring me, but there were moments when I was in a really sad place with the story for so many reasons. It wasn't an easy book to write - emotionally, physically, or creatively.
If you have no road map, you have to create your own.
The writing that I have found to be most false is the writing that doesn't offer hope.
For my family, 'black-ish' is the reward on a Thursday evening - a day after the show officially airs, when it's finally available to be streamed.
When someone says to me, 'I love your book - I read it in a day', I want to tell them to go back and read it again.
When I'm feeling frustrated with a story, I have faith that it's going to come. Also, when I first started writing, I wanted to write the stories that were not in my childhood, to represent people who hadn't historically been represented in literature.
I don't want anyone to walk through the world feeling invisible ever again.
The hardest part is telling one's story. Once the story is on the page, the rest will come.
The more specific we are, the more universal something can become. Life is in the details. If you generalize, it doesn't resonate. The specificity of it is what resonates.
I think, even though homophobia still exists, there is much more of a dialogue and a taboo around being homophobic.
I can't write about nice, easy topics because that won't change the world. And I do want to change the world - one reader at a time.
When I write, I don't think about messages for my readers.
I didn't know how many independent bookstores had amazing wine lists until I toured with 'Another Brooklyn.'
I don't want my kids to have to walk through a world where they have to constantly explain who they are and who their family is.
I love writing for young people. It's the literature that was most important to me, the stories that shaped me and informed my own journey as a writer.
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.'
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 brilliance and beauty that, even in its most brutal moments, did not - could not - kill our resilient and powerful spirit.
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.
Diversity is about all of us, and about us having to figure out how to walk through this world together.
I think 'Miracle's Boys' made more people aware of my work.
People want to know and understand each other across lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability.
The idea of feeling isolated is scary to me - to walk through the world alone would be heartbreaking.
You can't have too many books featuring people of color, just like you can't have too many books featuring white people.
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.
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 freedom we had.
I feel like once I say out loud, to the public, what I'm working on, it's never going to be an actual book. So until it's close to done, I keep pretty quiet about my next stuff!
I think there is such a richness to the South and a lushness and a way of life.
I do believe that books can change lives and give people this kind of language they wouldn't have had otherwise.
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.
The epistolary form is one of the hardest to write. It's so hard to show something that's bigger in a letter. Plus, you have to have the balance of how many letters are going to work to tell the story and how few are going to make it fall apart.
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 love.
I think, as a kid, turning on the television and seeing that everyone seemed to be wealthy and white made me feel like an outsider, lesser than. I was not wealthy. I was not white.
The conscious imprinting that happens between, say, 10 and 16 is huge. I think it's so important for me as a writer to stay open to the memories of that period because they were so formative.
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