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Biography

Fun Facts About Me

I can only write with my notebook turned sideways. When I was a kid, I wrote with it turned upside down.

I write, catch, and eat with my right hand. Everything else – batting, shooting a basket, holding a golf club, etc. is done with my left.

I can shake my eyeballs in bright light.

I have a long, long list of foods I don’t like. (I guess this isn’t really a ‘fun’ fact!)

I am very, very neat. Except when I am not.

I know the lyrics to about a thousand bad songs from the 1970s, including songs from tv commercials and television shows.

I have a lot of my writing memorized so that I don’t have to carry my books everywhere.

I once wrote a book in two weeks and it only needed a little revision.

The next book I wrote took four years.

I have only lost at checkers once or twice. I have only won at Chess once.

I can jump double-dutch.

Even though I can walk to a Brooklyn Nets game from my house, I’m still a die-hard Knicks fan.

I love it when it’s quiet and sunny.

Fall is my favorite season.

My son was born in the United States but since then, has never spent a birthday in this country. (His birthday is February 19th which is usually Winter Break.)

I share a birthday with Abraham Lincoln and Judy Blume.

I laugh at really dumb jokes.

Something many people don’t know about me:

When I was a toddler, I did a series of advertisements for Alaga Syrup in Ebony Magazine. Even though I was only two, I looked a lot older and the ads that ran often featured me as a school-aged child thinking about Alaga Syrup.
I don’t remember wishing anything about Alaga Syrup. I wasn’t even in school yet. Still, I think of it fondly because it was, technically, my first job.

There are a few special places I love to write…

Here in Brooklyn where I live: (Yes, there really are trees in New York City!)

Anywhere on the Cape where there are dunes nearby like in this picture:

Sitting on the yellow chair in my office:

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson is an American writer of books for adults, children, and adolescents. She is best known for her National Book Award-Winning memoir Brown Girl Dreaming, and her Newbery Honor-winning titles After Tupac and D Foster, Feathers, and Show Way. Her picture books The Day You Begin and The Year We Learned to Fly were NY Times Bestsellers. After serving as the Young People’s Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017, she was named the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature by the Library of Congress for 2018–19. She was awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 2020. Later that same year, she was named a MacArthur Fellow.