Not “Once upon a time” stories but basically, outright lies. I loved and still love watching words flower into sentences and sentences blossom into stories.

I chalked stories across sidewalks and penciled tiny tales in notebook margins. (It was not pretty for me when my mother found out.) I wrote on paper bags and my shoes and denim binders. I remember my uncle catching me writing my name in graffiti on the side of a building. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.I used to say I’d be a teacher or a lawyer or a hairdresser when I grew up but even as I said these things, I knew what made me happiest was writing. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement for her contributions to young adult literature and a two-time winner of the Jane Addams Children's Book Award. Jacqueline is also a recipient of the Margaret A. Her books include Coretta Scott King Award winner Before the Ever After New York Times bestsellers The Day You Begin and Harbor Me The Other Side, Each Kindness, Caldecott Honor book Coming On Home Soon Newbery Honor winners Feathers, Show Way, and After Tupac and D Foster and Miracle's Boys, which received the LA Times Book Prize and the Coretta Scott King Award. She is the author of dozens of award-winning books for young adults, middle graders, and children among her many accolades, she is a four-time Newbery Honor winner, a four-time National Book Award finalist, and a three-time Coretta Scott King Award winner. She wrote the adult books Red at the Bone, a New York Times bestseller, and Another Brooklyn, a 2016 National Book Award finalist. Born in Columbus, Ohio, Jacqueline grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, and Brooklyn, New York, and graduated from college with a B.A. She received the 2014 National Book Award for her New York Times bestselling memoir Brown Girl Dreaming, which was also a recipient of the Coretta Scott King Award, a Newbery Honor, the NAACP Image Award, and a Sibert Honor.

She was the 2018–2019 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, and in 2015, she was named the Young People’s Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. Jacqueline Woodson (the recipient of a 2020 MacArthur Fellowship, the 2020 Hans Christian Andersen Award, the 2018 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, and the 2018 Children’s Literature Legacy Award.

From the notebooks of melanin sun