Jacqueline Woodson, laureate 2018 1
adolescent psyche are already on display. In the
same year she also published The Dear One, a story about teen pregnancy. In book after book since, Jacqueline Woodson has returned to themes of racism, segregation, economic inequality, social vulnerability, prejudice and sexual identity. She writes in the first person and usually from a female point of view. Sometimes, however, her narrator is a boy: like eleven-year-old Lonnie, who tells us his story in Locomotion (2002). Lonnie and his little sister Lili have lost both parents in a fire and the two siblings now live with different foster mothers. Lonnie misses his sister fiercely. At school, Lonnie’s teacher encourages the children to write poems, and in the act of writing—the search for words—Lonnie discovers a way to process his grief. “Writing makes me remember,” he writes in one poem. “It’s like my family comes back again when I write.” Like many of Woodson’s characters, Lonnie uses writing as therapy. In a sequel titled Peace, Locomotion (2009), Lonnie writes letters to his sister to give her when they are older and can reunite. The letters give him hope and comfort, and are as lyrical as his poems. AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN VERSE Brown Girl Dreaming, published in 2014 and the winner of that year’s National Book Award, is an autobiographical work and in many ways the centerpiece of Woodson’s oeuvre. It is a story about her childhood that also illumines a chapter in African-American history from a grassroots level. Here, as in so much of Woodson’s work, the individual becomes universal. The young Jacqueline grows up in the 1960s and 1970s, an era of civil rights marches, police brutality and violence. Brown Girl Dreaming is a memoir in free verse, a lyrical scrapbook of personal memories and family stories. Places are central to Woodson’s books. In Brown Girl Dreaming, love and security exist in South Carolina, where her grandparents live. Its good-smelling gardens and wide blue skies form a dramatic contrast to the crowded concrete streets of Brooklyn. All of her settings are fully fleshed out, her stories tightly bound to the blocks, streets and apartments that her characters inhabit. Woodson’s careful descriptions illustrate social gulfs as well, recording differences between groups in minute detail. Clothing, too, serves as a social marker: for instance, when a character in an African-American neighborhood notices a friend suddenly wearing a style of shoe only white people wear. BRINGS HOPE TO DARK TOPICS After Tupac and D Foster (2008) is a story of lasting friendships. In it two girls who live with their mothers, without much money but in relative security, meet a new girl leading a rougher life on the margins of society. The story deals with the longing for a mother and a better life, dreams reflected in the rap lyrics of the girls’ idol, Tupac Shakur. When Tupac, a world-famous star who writes about their life, their reality, is suddenly shot and killed, the news is a harsh blow for all three. Woodson dissects their grief, but also leaves them with a measure of hope for the future. A passionate, lightning-bolt love is portrayed in If You Come Softly (1998). Ellie is a white middle-class girl who goes to the same school as Jeremiah, the son of a