Jacqueline Woodson: Author Spotlight for Locomotion

8/30/2022

Jacqueline Woodson

“If we want to build a better world, we have to represent it honestly and show young people their value and the value of everyone else walking through this world…” -Jacqueline Woodson

Writer, Poet, Playwright

Jacqueline Woodson has written over 30 books! Picture books, young adult novels, adult novels, and even a memoir. An incredibly talented and engaging writer, she has won countless awards for her work including  the Macarthur “Genius” Award, The Hans Christian Andersen Award, Newberry Honor Medal, Coretta Scott King Award, The Caldecott Medal, and National Book Award, just to name a few!

See a list of her books here and choose the one you want to read next!

We recommend Locomotion for our middle school readers, and then visit Orlando Family Stage for our production of Locomotion to see the story jump from page to stage! Click the image below for tickets!

 Jacqueline Woodson offers great advice for young writers. Watch this video to find her answers to the following questions.

• What makes a good story?
• How do you create characters?
• Do you rewrite your stories?
• What do you do about writer’s block?
• What advice do you have for young readers?

FUN FACT: Jacqueline Woodson has books published in English, Italian, Dutch, Tagalog, French, Spanish, German, Swedish, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, and Turkish and speaks English, Spanish, and some American Sign Language herself!

Representation is an important part of Jacqueline Woodson’s work, “Books, she said, should act as both mirrors and windows, a metaphor from an eminent scholar of children’s literature, Rudine Sims Bishop — they should both reflect people’s experiences and offer windows into different worlds. “These kids are in classrooms with all these windows and no mirrors, no books that reflect them.” As a young reader, as a girl growing up in black and brown neighborhoods in South Carolina and then in New York, Woodson found plenty of windows but not enough mirrors. So she began to make her own.” (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/19/magazine/jacqueline-woodson-red-at-the-bone.html)