Born February 12: Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson is the US nominee for the biennial Hans Christian Andersen Award to be announced in March. In her nearly two dozen books for young readers she has given voice to characters usually ignored or silenced in mainstream stories, and in doing so she's been a finalist for or won the National Book Award, the Newbery Honor Medal, the Caldecott Medal, the Coretta Scott King Award, the Margaret A. Edwards Award, the ALA Notable Book Award, the Parents' Choice Award, the Booklist Editors' Choice Award, and many, many regional prizes. She most often writes about friendship, especially across racial and class lines, and family or first love. Her girls are strong and her boys are caring, and she has included lgbtqi characters as adults and children, sometimes as the primary storyline. She's created a complete bibliography of her novels, with plot summaries and where and why she wrote each book. She lives in Brooklyn with her longtime partner and their two children, loves pizza, hates artichokes, and wisely doesn't believe in writer's block. The ALA's 2009 list of great lgbt reads for young readers included her novel After Tupac and D Foster about a trio of 11 to 13 year-olds coping with a tough neighborhood and the homophobia aimed at one of their brothers. Her most recent books are the story of brave girl coping, badly, with serious loss after Hurricane Katrina, Beneath a Meth Moon, and This Is the Rope: A Story From the Great Migration.