Jacqueline Woodson writes picture books (The Other Side) as well as books for middle graders (Locomotion) and young adults (Hush). She tackles tough issues head-on: race relations, foster care, and incarceration are just some of the issues that her characters confront. In 2014, Woodson won the National Book Award for young people’s literature, the Newbery Honor, and the Coretta Scott King Award for her memoir-in-verse, Brown Girl Dreaming.
In 2018, Woodson was inaugurated as the sixth National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature by the Library of Congress. During her tenure (2018-2019), Woodson will travel nationwide over the course of her two-year term promoting her platform, “READING = HOPE x CHANGE (What’s Your Equation?),” which encourages young people to think about how reading can help them create the hope and the change they want to see in the world. And in 2020, Woodson was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow (the “genius grant”).
