Ep. 36: Conflict: Jacqueline Woodson on Organic Discovery and How Picture Books Are the Ultimate Teacher

Here are some highlights from our episode with the #1 NYTimes bestselling, National Book Award-winning, former National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature Jacqueline Woodson:

 

• Starting stories with questions
• Writing "quiet" books that speak loudly
• The wisdom of young people, especially before that wisdom is silenced
• Deconstructing “show don’t tell”
• How to write about complicated topics with honesty and hope
• Separating yourself as a writer from the character and the story
• The questions Jackie is wrestling with right now
• Some things that have (and haven’t) changed about publishing

 

Jacqueline Woodson is an American writer of books for adults, children, and adolescents. She is best known for her National Book Award-Winning memoir Brown Girl Dreaming, and her Newbery Honor-winning titles After Tupac and D Foster, Feathers, and Show Way. Her picture books The Day You Begin and The Year We Learned to Fly were NY Times Bestsellers. After serving as the Young People’s Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017, she was named the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature by the Library of Congress for 2018–19. She was awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 2020. Later that same year, she was named a MacArthur Fellow.

 

Links from the episode:

• Mychal Threet’s “The Library Is for Everyone” shirt via Out of Print
• The Baldwin Fellowship Program
• Harbor Me by Jacqueline Woodson
• Before the Ever After by Jacqueline Woodson
• The Other Side by Jacqueline Woodson
• After Tupac and D Foster by Jacqueline Woodson