Jacqueline Woodson: 'I don't want anyone to feel invisible'

Jacqueline Woodson was already the author of 28 children’s books, most of them award-winning, when her Brown Girl Dreaming won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature last week. She is a three-time recipient of Newbery Honors, and she’d been nominated for the NBA before. Her achievement, however, was swiftly eclipsed by coverage of the racist joke that Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, made after she got off the stage. In a phone interview with the Guardian she declined to comment on the firestorm, though she also said she will, eventually. “I’m trying to figure out how to think about it,” she said.

Such care is reflected in the way Woodson speaks: slowly and thoughtfully, and from a place of deep reflection about the culture she is in. Her books span many settings and situations, but they always express the experiences of young people of color. She is committed to making those stories visible, yet she writes her books within the frame of a very white industry. “I feel like, as a person of color, I’ve always been kind of doing the work against the tide,” she said, though she is still optimistic. “I feel like change is coming, and change sometimes comes too slow for a lot of us. But it comes.”

Woodson is 51 and lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with her partner and two children. She was born in Ohio, and lived there and in Greenville, South Carolina. When she was six, her single mother brought her brothers and sisters to live in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. That early part of her life is what Brown Girl Dreaming tracks. In short lines of blank verse, it traces Woodson’s life from birth to about the age of 10.

The clean simplicity of Woodson’s writing delivers beautiful and deep metaphors. A dying grandfather is comforted by young Jacqueline’s stories, and she remarks: “This I can do – find him another place to be / when this world is choking him.” The entire book is a love letter to the power of stories, in fact, though it doesn’t overly sentimentalise how others react to storytelling. “Keep making up stories, my uncle says,” the narrator writes. “You’re lying, my mother says.”

Woodson says she began writing the book when her mother died suddenly. She described the death as a “wake-up call that the people I love, and the people who know my story, and the people who know my history are not always going to be here.” Writing became a quest to make sure some kind of record existed. “I just started writing down memories,” she said, and gradually she came to realise there were holes in hers.

Interviewing relatives, she said, allowed her to see her mother differently: “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.’”

There she hints at how entwined her own story is with the history of America. The book tracks young Jacqueline’s experiences of racism in the deep south to her lessons, in a New York City school, about the divided history of the city:

And all of New York was called New Amsterdam,
run by a man
named Peter Stuyvesant. There were slaves here.
Those who could afford to own
their freedom
lived on the other side of the wall.
And now that place is called Wall Street.

For some, a book-length poem might look like a daunting read, but Brown Girl Dreaming glides down easily. And its subject matter clearly hits a nerve even if its form is unusual. Woodson said she’d heard both “from fourth-grade girls and from 70-year-old women” who related to the book. In fact, one adult reader, Ashley Ford of Buzzfeed, has called the book “the realisation of a dream”. Ford pointed out that one reason women of color flock to books like Woodson’s is that their own childhood libraries were only sparsely populated with stories about people of color.

“I didn’t know my absence until I saw myself,” Woodson said on this subject. She read Judy Blume’s Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret? like everyone else. And she did find things in its protagonist to relate to, but it involved a search. “I would have to find myself through those windows,” Woodson said. “Because if not, then what did I have?”

But then she found Virginia Hamilton and John Steptoe, both writers of color. They wrote about city kids, and in their work she found “a full body and a full story”, Woodson said. “That’s when I looked back and began to recognize the absence that had been there before.” Woodson also lists James Baldwin and Rosa Guy as influences. “They were writing about young adults,” she pointed out, and she read them when she was young herself. All these writers, she said, gave her a sense of her own “legitimacy”.

“The longing [for those books] is in what’s not said,” she said, of her own fans. They write to her and tell her they love her books and that they’ve never read anything like them, but the clear message is they want more of it. So to that end, Woodson is involved with an effort called We Need Diverse Books. The idea, she says, is to keep the call for diverse books from being “just a hashtag”. She explains that the initiative has concrete plans to put diverse books in libraries and more importantly in publishing, by funding paid internships for example. After his racist gaffe, Handler contributed $110,000.

And Woodson says what she always hoped to accomplish in her own work is to make books be a kind of companion for everyone. “I want it to be there for the people who need it. I don’t want anyone to walk through the world feeling invisible ever again,” she said.

“And in writing about all kinds of families, all kinds of people, writing across socioeconomic class and race, and gender and sexuality, you know it’s hard not to come to a book and find some part of yourself in it. If the people who need it can find it then, I’ve done what I needed to do.”