By The Poetry Foundation
The Poetry Foundation is honored to announce that Jacqueline Woodson has been named the Young People’s Poet Laureate.
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.
The laureate advises 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.
This laureateship aims to promote poetry to children and their families, teachers, and librarians over the course of its two-year tenure.
“Jacqueline Woodson is an elegant, daring, and restlessly innovative writer,” said Poetry Foundation president Robert Polito.”So many writers settle on a style and a repertoire of gestures and subjects, but Woodson, like her characters, is always in motion and always discovering something fresh. As she once told an interviewer, ‘If you have no road map, you have to create your own.’ Her gifts, adventurousness and generosity, suggest she will be a terrific young people’s poet laureate.”
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Woodson was born in Columbus, Ohio, and grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, and Brooklyn, New York.
She is the author of more than 30 books for children and young adults, including From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun (1995), which was named a Coretta Scott King Honor Book and won a Jane Addams Children’s Book Award; Miracle’s Boys (2000), which won the 2001 Coretta Scott King Award and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Hush (2002), a National Book Award finalist; Locomotion (2003), also a National Book Award finalist; Coming on Home Soon (2004), a Caldecott Honor Book and a Booklist Editors’ Choice; and Behind You (2004), included in the New York Public Library’s list of best Books of the Teen Age.
Three of Woodson’s books have been named Newbery Honor Books: Show Way (2005), Feathers (2007), and After Tupac & D Foster (2008).
Her recent books include the young adult novel Beneath a Meth Moon (2012), which Jonathan Demme is adapting for the screen, and Brown Girl Dreaming (2014), a novel in verse about Woodson’s family and segregation in the South, which won a National Book Award and was named a Newbery Honor Book.
In an op-ed for the New York Times, Woodson described how she wrote the book:
“As I interviewed relatives in both Ohio and Greenville, S.C., I began to piece together the story of my mother’s life, my grandparents’ lives and the lives of cousins, aunts and uncles. These stories, and the stories I had heard throughout my childhood, were told with the hope that I would carry on this family history and American history, so that those coming after me could walk through the world as armed as I am.”
Woodson was awarded a Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement in writing for young adults, a St. Katharine Drexel Award, and an Anne V. Zarrow Award for Young Readers’ Literature.
In recognition of Woodson’s achievements, the Poetry Foundation is featuring her in a Poetry off the Shelf podcast and an interview.
Woodson currently lives in Brooklyn with her family.
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Beachwood Bonus Material:
Meet the Author.
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Brown Girl Dreaming.
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From second-graders in Ms. Wegley’s class:
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See also:
* Woodson Tells Nashville Students To Do What They Love.
* Woodson Has Pizza With Upstate New York Kids.
* New York Times Review of Brown Girl Dreaming:
“This is a book full of poems that cry out to be learned by heart. These are poems that will, for years to come, be stored in our bloodstream.”
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Comments welcome.
Posted on June 8, 2015