Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson is an award-winning author of more than 30 books for children, young adults and adults. Born in Columbus, Ohio, she grew up in Greenville, South Carolina and Brooklyn, New York. She studied English at Adelphi University.

Her novels and picture books include Miracle’s Boys, which won a Coretta Scott King Award and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Hush, a National Book Award finalist; Locomotion, also a National Book Award finalist; Coming on Home Soon, a Caldecott Honor Book and the forthcoming, Another Brooklyn.

Ms. Woodson was chosen by the United States as the Hans Christian Andersen Nominee and was shortlisted for this international prize. She has received numerous lifetime achievement awards including the Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Medal and The Margaret A. Edwards Award, which honors an author’s lifetime contribution in writing for young adults. For her books After Tupac and D Foster, Feathers, and Show Way, she received Newbery Honors.

In 2014, Ms. Woodson, a three-time finalist, was named the National Book winner for Young People’s Literature Award for her memoir in verse, Brown Girl Dreaming. Brown Girl Dreaming, about Woodson’s coming of age as a writer in both the north and south, was named a Newbery Honor Book and received both Coretta Scott King and NAACP Image Awards.

In June 2015, Woodson was honored with the Langston Hughes Medal. She was also named the Young People’s Poet Laureate by The Poetry Foundation. Awarded every two years, the $25,000 laureate title is given to a living writer in recognition of a career devoted to writing exceptional poetry for young readers. In this role, Woodson will advise the Poetry Foundation on matters relating to young people’s literature and may engage in a variety of projects to help instill a lifelong love of poetry among the nation’s developing readers.