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Jacqueline Woodson

Middle Grade/Young Adult

book cover of Remember Us showing graffiti of the title on a brick wall with a face and a basketball sitting on the sidewalk

Remember Us

For 11 year old Sage, it was the year the whole world seemed to be on fire

Where it takes place:

In the Bushwick section of Brooklyn.

Where I wrote it:

In Brooklyn and while I was traveling around the country.

Why I wrote it:

I wanted to write a novel about the fires that happened in my childhood neighborhood and so I created the character, Sage, who dreams of being a pro-basketball player. Sage and her sweet and wise best friend, Freddy, like me when I was their age, are trying to understand what it means to live in a world that feels like it’s burning.

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.