Upon the release of Another Brooklyn, her first novel for adults in twenty years, Award-Winning author Jacqueline Woodson discusses New York city’s literary legacy, the strength in being a person of color, putting humanity on the page, living in the age of beyoncé, and happiness.
JACQUELINE Woodson is the author of more than two dozen acclaimed books for young adults, middle graders, and children—a body of work that places African American characters at the center of richly drawn narratives that have helped young readers engage with real-life situations such as interracial relationships, child abuse, poverty, and homosexuality.
Her own childhood story— she was a precocious daughter of parents in a troubled marriage, who found solace in the imaginative world of books, and eventually in writing— forms the basis of her New York Times bestselling memoir Brown Girl Dreaming (Nancy Paulsen Books, 2014), which won a National Book Award, the Coretta Scott King Award, the Newbery Honor Award, an NAACP Image Award, and the Sibert Honor Award. Brown Girl Dreaming also traces Woodson’s journey from Ohio to South Carolina to Brooklyn, an eye-opening childhood in which she learns, among other things, about the regional differences of the black experience during the 1970s.
With the release of Another Brooklyn (Amistad), her first adult novel in twenty years, Woodson revisits that important period of dramatic social changes. August, a young black girl who moves with her father and brother from Tennessee to the culturally rich Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick, comes of age during a time when her empowerment as a black woman offers new freedoms as well as familiar demons: classism, racism, and sexism. Another Brooklyn follows August as she learns the hard lessons of adolescence, uplifted by the strength of her girlhood friendships and guided by her family’s religious conversion. All the while, the terrible truth of her mother’s fate back in Tennessee weighs heavily on her emotional well-being.
This story is from the September - October 2016 edition of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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This story is from the September - October 2016 edition of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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