Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson born February 12, 1963 is an American writer of books for children and adolescents. She is best known for Miracle's Boys, which won the Coretta Scott King Award in 2001, and her Newbery Honor-winning titles Brown Girl Dreaming, After Tupac and D Foster, Feathers, and Show Way. For her lifetime contribution as a children's writer, Woodson won the Margaret Edwards Award in 2005 and she was the U.S. nominee for the biennial, international Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2014. IBBY named her one of six Andersen Award finalists on March 17, 2014. She won the National Book Award in 2014 in the category of Young People's Literature for Brown Girl Dreaming, and was nominated in Fiction for Another Brooklyn. In January 2016 the American Library Association announced that Jacqueline Woodson would deliver the 2017 May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture, which recognizes significant contribution to children's literature. 2Writing career After college, Woodson went to work for Kirchoff/Wohlberg, a children's packaging company. She helped to write the California standardized reading tests and caught the attention of a Liza Pulitzer-Voges, a children's book agent at the same company. Although the partnership did not work out, it did get her first manuscript out of a drawer. She then enrolled in Bunny Gable's children's book writing class at the New School, where Bebe Willoughby, an editor at Delacorte, heard a reading from Last Summer with Maizon and requested the manuscrip