Credit...Sharif Hamza for The New York Times

Feature

Jacqueline Woodson Transformed Children’s Literature. Now She’s Writing for Herself.

The award-winning author on her mission to diversify publishing — and why she turned back to adult readers with her new novel, “Red at the Bone.”

When Jacqueline Woodson’s mother died, late in the summer of 2009, the writer and her siblings had to sort out what to do with the Brooklyn building where they spent much of their childhoods. Their mother bought a three-story townhouse in the Bushwick neighborhood decades earlier, for only $30,000, and by the time she died, a development boom was spilling over from neighboring Williamsburg, driving up values and driving out residents. But Woodson did not find herself dealing with a readily lucrative asset: Because of predatory lending that targeted black homeowners, she says, her mother died owing $300,000, and the house was in foreclosure. “My siblings and I are like, ‘Let’s just short-sell it; let’s just dump it,’ ” Woodson says. But the more she visited the building — traveling across the borough from the Park Slope townhouse she shares with her partner and their two children — the more she felt herself wanting to hold on to her childhood home, one of the first places she lived in Brooklyn after moving from Greenville, S.C., at 7.

Woodson is a prolific author of books for children and young adults, and at the time, she was at work on a few different projects. One was “Brown Girl Dreaming,” a memoir in verse that would win the 2014 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. But there was also an impressionistic adult novel, “Another Brooklyn,” in which a woman, unable to confront her mother’s death, recalls her childhood in the Bushwick of the 1970s, when the area was undergoing white flight instead of the more recent outflux of black and Latinx residents. That one would become a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction.

“At the end,” Woodson says, “I was like, ‘You know, this was my mother’s dream.’ This was the whole Great Migration, for her to come from the South to Brooklyn, to eventually buy a home and to get her kids launched.” So Woodson took a loan against her own townhouse and began renovating her mother’s home for rental. The process made her interested in writing a new story, about the precariousness of generational wealth, especially for black families. She had also been jotting down notes about the Tulsa Massacre of 1921 — two days of violence in which a mob of white Oklahomans attacked and burned what was then one of the wealthiest black communities in the United States, killing as many as 300 people.

Woodson has woven both threads into her latest book, “Red at the Bone,” published this month. Beginning in New York in the months before Sept. 11, 2001, it moves back and forth through time, tracing the history and legacy of both sides of its central character’s family. It is Woodson’s third-ever novel for adults and the second within the last three years — a book that highlights her potential to have as big an impact on adult literature as she’s had on younger readers. At 56, Woodson is already the author of 21 novels, 13 picture books and one memoir, publishing a title nearly every year since 1990. She has won countless major literary awards, some in multiples. When she first began publishing books, the industry was considerably whiter, from the people who made the books to the characters inside them. Many credit Woodson herself with helping to change that, at least incrementally. She has broadened the scope of children’s and young-adult literature in particular, and not just in terms of its demographics; her work has been challenged in some schools and libraries because of its frank portrayals of sexuality and interracial relationships, something she first learned during a phone conversation with the Y.A. giant Judy Blume. (“Love Jackie Woodson,” Blume said, when asked about this.) Woodson writes “in a way that feels unbridled by the marketplace,” says Lisa Lucas, the executive director of the National Book Foundation. “I think of her as a person with very few limits, whether that’s moving between poetry and prose, whether that’s moving between adult and young reader.”

“Red at the Bone” is also the first time Woodson has written adult fiction set in her longtime home of Park Slope. That’s where I found her on a muggy afternoon this summer, at a bakery she used to frequent when she was working on “Brown Girl Dreaming.” She’d just returned from a trip to Ghana with her family and was fighting jet lag as she told me how this neighborhood, too, had changed. When she bought a house here 16 years ago, she said, some people still called it “Dyke Slope,” and its residents were more diverse. Now, Woodson said, her family was one of only a few households of color on her block, and she’d grown wary of types like “that neighbor who keeps asking for a play date because you know they want their kid to have a black friend.”

She has often mined similar dynamics in her writing. A poem in “Brown Girl Dreaming” about her great-grandfather William Woodson, the only black child at his white school, also inspired her to write a picture book, “The Day You Begin,” published last year, which shows young children navigating spaces where nobody else looks quite like them. When I told Woodson that my oldest sister cried while reading it, and that she sometimes marks up the white characters in her baby’s picture books so they look Asian, like my family, Woodson smiled. She’d already told me, in a phone call weeks earlier, that her need to write comes from her deep indignation at growing up “in a time when my ordinary life wasn’t represented” — how “every time I read a book as a kid where I didn’t see myself, I was like, you know, ‘[expletive] this!’ I wasn’t allowed to curse then, but looking back on it, I’m sure that was what I was thinking.”

I don’t remember my mother reading to me or my sisters picture books with any human characters at all. Instead, she read us books with animals as protagonists — talking cats or owls or dogs with funny hats — which may have been her way to combat that absence of us on the page. It would have been comforting, I thought, to have had books like Woodson’s when I was a child. And it would have been validating in the most essential way to have seen characters whose everyday lives looked like mine.

“When I go into classrooms,” Woodson said, “I’ll look at the class makeup and it will be all these kids of color, and they’ll have all these books with no people of color in them. I’m like: ‘Come on! Is it just by accident or by design that you’re not letting the literature reflect your young people?’ ” Books, she said, should act as both mirrors and windows, a metaphor from an eminent scholar of children’s literature, Rudine Sims Bishop — they should both reflect people’s experiences and offer windows into different worlds. “These kids are in classrooms with all these windows and no mirrors, no books that reflect them.” As a young reader, as a girl growing up in black and brown neighborhoods in South Carolina and then in New York, Woodson found plenty of windows but not enough mirrors. So she began to make her own.

If you went to elementary school a few decades ago, in California or Texas or Virginia, and you took a statewide standardized test, there’s a small chance you were among Woodson’s earliest readers. After college at Adelphi University, she held various jobs before she was able to write full time, including one as a drama therapist for homeless and runaway teenagers in New York and another writing short stories for children’s reading-comprehension tests. It was in the latter capacity that she wrote about a fictional girl named Maizon, who would — after Woodson received encouragement at a children’s-book-writing class at the New School — become the protagonist of her first novel, published when she was 27. A 1990 review of the book in The Times noted her “sure understanding of the thoughts of young people,” closing with the hope that “Woodson’s pen writes steadily on” — which it did, and at a terrific clip. There were books like “From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun,” in 1995, about a boy whose mother tells him she is gay; “Miracle’s Boys,” in 2000, about three young brothers in Harlem, which won a Coretta Scott King Award; and “Beneath a Meth Moon,” in 2012, winner of an American Library Association “Best Fiction for Young Adults” award, about a teenager’s addiction and the fallout of Hurricane Katrina.

Woodson hadn’t entirely planned on writing for young people. She had always wanted to write everything, across genres and media; her inspirations were figures like Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou and Nikki Giovanni. But she credits that class at the New School with guiding her to look at the interior lives of children. “I thought, Here is where my voice can be heard,” she says. “Here is where my voice is very necessary.”

In 1985, of the estimated 2,500 children’s books published in the United States, only 18 were by black authors or illustrators, according to research by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Last year, of the 3,653 books submitted to the C.C.B.C., 202 were by African or African-American writers and illustrators — a notable but imperfect improvement. There were many factors in this change, but many in the industry will tell you that Woodson’s decades of writing are among them.

“She has just set a standard for herself and for others,” says Kathleen T. Horning, the director of the C.C.B.C. “I think when kids read her books, they feel like it’s somebody who isn’t making the world seem different from how it is.” Jason Reynolds, a writer of children’s and young-adult books, says Woodson has spent her career challenging the industry to help children understand themselves and their surroundings: “It doesn’t have to be this hokey, you know, apple-pie type of story. Nor does it have to be about slaves.” He points to Woodson’s middle-grade novel “Harbor Me,” published last year — a sort of “reimagining of ‘The Breakfast Club,’ ” he says, where students gather every week in a classroom to talk about their lives, like one child’s fear that his missing father has been deported.

Woodson’s intuition for what motivates people — and her eye for capturing stories that are harder to find on the page — emerges even more in her adult literature. “Red at the Bone” revolves around a teenage pregnancy that draws together two black families of different social classes. Iris leaves her baby, Melody, at home in Park Slope to be raised by her family and the baby’s father and tries to forge an independent identity for herself; the novel takes its name from her longing for another woman while she’s a student at Oberlin, the way she “felt red at the bone — like there was something inside of her undone and bleeding.” The older generations of Iris’s family, we learn, fled the Tulsa Massacre to settle in New York City and try to rebuild their wealth, all the while knowing how tenuous that effort might be. “Those white folks came with their torches and their rages,” says Sabe, the matriarch whose mother was nearly burned to death as a child. “Turned my people’s lives and dreams to ash. So my mama taught me all I know about holding on to what’s yours. I know you hold on to your dreams and you hold on to your money.” In July, the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates took to Instagram to praise the book. “This is the wealth gap as literature,” he wrote. “But it never says that. Never didactic.” Certain topics, he told me later by phone, can be difficult to communicate to people directly. “It’s become really clear to me,” he said, “that sometimes those things are better said in the form of stories and in fiction.”

There is an urgency to Woodson’s writing in the book, as though she’s willing her characters to reveal the humanity of real-life people. Amid the increase of racist political rhetoric over the past few years, she said, working on the novel “felt like writing against such a tide.” She recalled a conversation she had with her partner, Juliet Widoff, after Donald Trump announced his campaign for the presidency. “Juliet was like, ‘This is so ridiculous; this is such a joke.’ ” But Woodson was traveling the country promoting her memoir and noticing what she describes as “a lot of white rage.” She disagreed: “I’m like, ‘He’s going to win.’ ”

And in the world of children’s books, she saw a related sense of agitation. There, white writers were trying to create characters of color but receiving criticism from people of color who felt that those stories were not being thoughtfully or accurately told and that they should be the ones telling them. These conversations were clearly new ones for some of the people involved, but they were entirely familiar to Woodson. Twenty-one years ago, in 1998, she wrote an essay in The Horn Book Magazine, a children’s-literature journal, titled “Who Can Tell My Story” — a foundational piece that questioned whether white people who had only other white people in their lives were equipped to tell the stories of black, brown or immigrant folks. She wasn’t particularly surprised to find herself, decades later, watching the same discussions unfold, only now in concert with vitriolic news cycles. She saw, she says, “a lot of people panicking about diversity” — a lot of people “trying to get a foothold of where they fit into the movement.”

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Woodson’s intuition for what motivates people — and her eye for capturing stories that are harder to find on the page — emerges even more in her adult literature.Credit...Sharif Hamza for The New York Times

The day after we met in Brooklyn, Woodson and I sat together on a train, heading north to an old farmhouse in Brewster, N.Y., en route to a place Woodson calls “Baldwin.” Last year, after winning the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, the world’s largest prize for children’s literature, Woodson used the half-million dollars in prize money to help start Baldwin for the Arts, an organization that will give fellowships to emerging artists of color in the name of the writer James Baldwin. Woodson owns the farmhouse and the property and plans to renovate the outbuildings, where people will stay and work on their art.

As the city receded behind us, giving way to suburbs and trees, I wondered if Woodson ever tired of the additional work she’d taken on as a writer — if she felt trapped by an obligation to constantly explain the need for her work to others. To be black or brown or immigrant or queer in any prominent capacity, in spaces where there aren’t many people like you, means that you’ll most likely find yourself an ambassador, tasked with justifying your existence and your value. It also means that others like you will look to you for guidance.

At first, Woodson said, she was a “reluctant ambassador.” Part of her once felt overwhelmed that she would have to engage constantly with “so many people who don’t see us, who never even thought about people of color at all.” But as a measured, patient person — perhaps, she says, because of being raised a Jehovah’s Witness — she eventually accepted the role, promoting young people’s literature for national organizations and becoming an outspoken voice within the industry. When she won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature in 2014, she wound up having to explain to people — including in a Times Op-Ed — why it was hurtful that the event’s M.C., her friend Daniel Handler, tried to make a joke about her allergy to watermelon. Jason Reynolds recalled another story from that time. A reporter asked Woodson how it felt to win the biggest award of her career, and she responded, according to Reynolds, almost as a reflex: “Says who? Why is this award any different than the Coretta Scott King awards that I’ve won? Why is it any different than all the other accolades that you may not have heard of, or that you may not respect?”

At the train station, Widoff and the couple’s daughter, Toshi, picked us up, and we circled a reservoir until we reached a long driveway. From the road, we could see a large red barn with white trim, and at the end of the drive stood a stately farmhouse and a handful of guest cottages. The land and its centuries-old buildings, Woodson said, were once owned by Enoch Crosby, an American spy during the Revolutionary War. “This is going to be the kitchen space,” she said, gesturing to the first floor of a barn where cows were once milked. “This is going to be two artist studios — visual artists,” she said, near another building.

In 1995, Woodson wrote an essay, published in The Horn Book Magazine, about the invisibility of black people in literature and what it meant for her to be a black writer in the mostly white world of children’s book publishing. She was 32 then, and had just published her seventh book. “I want to leave a sign of having been here,” she wrote. “The rest of my life is committed to changing the way the world thinks, one reader at a time.”

Today, she says, “I’m thinking about the people who are coming behind me and what their mirrors and windows are, what they’re seeing and what they’re imagining themselves become.” But as she began to conceive of her two most recent adult novels, she recognized something. She wasn’t about to stop writing for young readers, but she felt a certain security with the industry she’d helped shape. “I felt like I had done what I had been called to do in the children’s-book world,” she said. “I know that sounds kind of conceited, but I went in there, I wrote 20-some books — I forget how many books I had written. I had done the work to fill that hole, and I had nurtured a bunch of other writers of color.” In all our conversations, she’d always been self-deprecating when talking about her success, but now she sounded firm and animated. “So the thing was in motion that made sense, that made me feel like: ‘O.K., you know what? I’m going to sit back — and here’s the story I want to tell now.’ ”

Kat Chow is a reporter for NPR and Code Switch. She is working on a memoir about grief and identity.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 52 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Who Tells This Story?. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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