Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson:
I'm here because of my mom and my grandma, my great-grandma, my great-grandfather, and my grandfather. That is important to my narrative.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Our stories are more than just us. They don't start when we come of age, when we're born, or not even when our parents meet. The thread can go back as far as you want it to. And for Jacqueline Woodson, there is nothing more important than acknowledging and protecting that. Jacqueline is an icon in children's literature, honored with just about every award: Newbery, Coretta Scott King, National Book Award, MacArthur Genius Grant. My friend, librarian Cicely Lewis, sums it up pretty well.

Cicely Lewis:
She's a legend. When you hear her name, there's some authors, they're just like actors, like Cicely Tyson. If you know that Cicely Tyson's in a movie, you know that's a good movie, and Jacqueline Woodson is on that level. If Jacqueline Woodson writes a book, I just know that her reputation precedes her.

Fortunately for us, Jacqueline Woodson continues to put out that great content, building on the legacy of her three-decade career. And she's fighting to keep the voices of the past alive while also empowering the writers of the future.

Jacqueline Woodson:
What I know about young people is they haven't been broken and they're fiery and they're ready to fight for this world and their existence in it.

In today's episode, Jacqueline stresses the importance of acknowledging the past within the narratives of the present. She reflects on the industry's evolution throughout her extensive career, and she tells us why she thinks modern-day education needs to make more room for and embrace different kinds of learning and thinking.

My name is Jordan Lloyd Bookey, and this is The Reading Culture, a show where we speak with authors and reading enthusiasts to explore ways to build a stronger culture of reading in our communities. We dive into their personal experiences, their inspirations, and why their stories and ideas motivate kids to read more. Also, remember to join The Reading Culture on Instagram at @thereadingculturepod and sign up for our new newsletter at thereadingculturepod.com/newsletter to hear more from our authors, access bonus content, and learn about exclusive giveaways like author-signed books. Finally, please take a moment to subscribe to the podcast and give us a five-star rating.

When you were younger, if your siblings were to characterize you, how would they characterize Jackie? You went by Jackie.

Jacqueline Woodson:
My sister always said I was immature, that I was annoying, that I was a tattletale. I think all the things that older siblings think of younger siblings, I was that child, and I was that kid who always wanted to hang with my big sister, who didn't want to hang with me. I think they didn't have a sense of my interior life in the way that siblings don't. We weren't that kind of family. I mean, we knew our exterior selves [inaudible 00:03:35] the selves that we encountered when we were playing board games or playing tag on the street, but I don't think we knew what kind of interior monologues we were having. I feel like I had a better sense of my siblings than they had of me.

Huh. Why do you think that is?

Jacqueline Woodson:
I think because I was much more of a watcher than they were. They were into other stuff. My brother was such a mad scientist, and my sister was just this deep intellectual that used fiction as an escape, not writing it but reading it. And so in terms of my little brother, I don't know him so much. I think of him as a younger me, but in terms of my older siblings, you do spend your childhood studying them while they're just trying to flick you off like a fly because it's aspirational, right?

Yeah. And you've written a lot about your siblings and how they thrived academically, especially your older sister, who was deemed gifted. I was wondering if you ever thought about how they viewed you through that lens, considering that you struggled early on.

Jacqueline Woodson:
I think they thought I was a pain in the butt, because there was no room for academic failure in our family. My mother, that was her thing. You had to read; you had to excel academically, and if I was doing poorly, they got blamed because they both were doing fabulously, and so they had to spend time with me with my homework. They had to spend time with me with reading. They had to make sure that I was doing okay in school, and I think time that they could have been playing or something, it was like, "We got to go help Jackie with her homework." So I think that was interesting, especially looking back on it.

We also all had to have dinner together. That was one of the rules of the house, not the grownups, but the kids. We all had to sit down to dinner together, and I think that was the time where we actually had some conversation that was not inside the realms of academia, but I don't really remember what happened.

I do look back on it and think that... My siblings and I get together for every birthday. We make sure we have a text strand. There is this way in which we're deeply connected to each other. That must have happened around that dinner table. It must have happened during all the times that my mom said, "You don't have to go outside. You have each other to play with," because we were four kids together. But it's interesting. I should... No, I'm not going to ask them what they thought of me. I feel like I know.

Okay, Jacqueline. So in rereading a lot of your work, there's just this really interesting thought that you carry throughout, and I wanted to read these two quotes or passages in particular. The first is from Brown Girl Dreaming and reads, "Maybe the truth is somewhere in between all that I'm told and memory." And the second quote is from Red at the Bone, and it goes, "Every day since she was a baby, I told Iris the story. How they came with intention. How the only thing they wanted was to see us gone. Our money gone. Our shops and schools and libraries, everything just good and gone. And even though it happened twenty years before I was even a thought, I carry it. I carry the goneness. Iris carries the goneness. And watching her walk down those stairs, I know now that my grandbaby carries the goneness too." It's so beautiful.

So the reason I chose those two passages is because when I reread Brown Girl Dreaming, I was so interested by the very early stories in your early childhood because this is your memoir and, at the same time, many of the stories that you tell as your own were clearly passed down to you and they are what you carry, like the goneness in Red at the Bone, this idea of carrying the past from your beginning and forward, that just really struck me.

Jacqueline Woodson:
I think I think of it just as that; it's a continuum, and that's why I start Red at the Bone with, "But that afternoon there was an orchestra playing," to show the reader that they're dropped down into the middle of something, that this is not the beginning, that we are not the beginning, that I'm here because of my mom and my grandma, my great-grandma, my great-grandfather, and my grandfather, and that that is important to my narrative and how I got to story and how I got to being all the things that I am.

And I think that it's an interesting paradigm right now because so much of what's happening is this attempted erasure of that narrative, that attempt to break a line. And so for me in the fiction, it is so much about keeping that continuum going that someone's going to come along after me and tell a story that's connected to the story that I've told. I'm telling the story that's connected to the writers and the relatives who came before me. And it's important for me in so many ways, and one of the biggest ways to know that I'm not here by accident and I'm not here alone.

When do you think that that came to you, that understanding?

Jacqueline Woodson:
Definitely, the older I get, the more I understand it, but I do think, even as a child and being a melancholy child, it was somewhere inside of me. And I was always thinking about old people and who was here before me and history and even geography, just wanting to understand the enormity of our existences, mine in particular because I was a child and it was all it. And I think it does come too from coming from a religious background and all that carries, but just wanting to have a sense of what I mean in the world and why I'm here. And I think, as kids, we always ask those kind of philosophical young questions and think we're understanding and not necessarily doing so. But I do think, from a very young age, I was questioning.

I did read a couple of books that you frequently reference as having read when you were younger, which I don't know if they're the passages you chose, but I also feel like how could you not be melancholy because I'm like, "These just would not... If I pick up Little Match Girl and read that to my..." I mean, you can, you do, but it's like, "They don't make them like that anymore."

Jacqueline Woodson:
I know, I know. It's so true. Even the grim fairy tales, there was this violence that was about trying to teach, and I think now we have the conversations in a kinder way that don't always seem to work, but when you look at something like Little Match Girl, it's a devastating story and it's shrouded in fairytale kind of, but at the same time, in its brutality, it's showing us empathy. For me, I was horrified that something like that could happen to anybody, let alone a child. And even from a young age, the first thing you think is, "That's unfair. That's unfair." And that that's unfair becomes the conversation that's about social justice and empathy and wanting to reset the world in some way and make it right.

Yes, the town is dreary. On August afternoons the road is empty, white with dust, and the sky above is bright as glass. Nothing moves, there are no children's voices, only the hum of the mill. The peach trees seem to grow more crooked every summer, and the leaves are dull gray and of a sickly delicacy. The house of Miss Amelia leans so much to the right that it is now only a question of time when it will collapse completely, and people are careful not to walk around the yard. There is no good liquor to be bought in the town; the nearest still is eight miles away, and the liquor is such that those who drink it grow warts on their livers the size of goobers, and dream themselves into a dangerous inward world. There is absolutely nothing to do in the town. Walk around the millpond, stand kicking at a rotten stump, figure out what you can do with the old wagon wheel by the side of the road near the church. The soul rots with boredom. You might as well go down to the Forks Falls highway and listen to the chain gang.

Carson McCullers, a Georgia-born southern Gothic writer, published her novella, Ballad of the Sad Café, in 1951 as part of a collection that included six short stories. With a remarkable ability to portray southern life in an honest, palpable way, her work has become a lasting account of this bygone era through a lens of acceptance and empathy for marginalized people. Her carefully crafted poetic sentences are simple but vivid, dropping us right into, as Jacqueline would describe it, a previous chapter of America's continuum.

Jacqueline Woodson:
I remember hearing an album, and this is when I was first starting to really, really think about writing in a deeper way, and I heard Carson McCullers' read on this album, and I realized that her southern accent was one we don't hear anymore.

Carson McCullers:
You might as well walk down to the Forks Falls Highway and listen to the chain gang.

Jacqueline Woodson:
The people who spoke the way she was speaking, so many of them are no longer with us, just because even the lilt of our language changes. I think about how my mom and grandma speak, and then I go down south, where my other relatives are in that same part of Greenville, and they don't speak like my mother and grandmother spoke. So I remember hearing her read from this and I can never get the way she read it out of my head. I realize so much of what I wrote after this is informed by this passage.

And when did you read it? When did you first read it?

Jacqueline Woodson:
I first read it probably in 1990, 1989, 1990.

Wow. I feel like that description of your souls, with the boredom, it's like something of a time and an age, and it feels like that is a piece of history now. You will never get that back.

Jacqueline Woodson:
It's so true. "Go down to the Forks Fall Highway and listen to the chain gang." The chain gang's gone. Just that quietude. And also just the fact that she doesn't use a lot of adjectives. She just tells it like it is, and it's still so beautifully effective in this way that you can just feel this dead town. Even in that, she never talks about the heat of it, but it just feels like a hot, dusty, dry, dead town.

Yeah, you can feel it.

Jacqueline Woodson:
Yeah.

I'm sure you really can feel it from remembering those summers.

Jacqueline Woodson:
Oh, man. So true.

Yeah. But also, I do think that the way how you just said that she does it, I think that is also your writing, there's very little excess, if any. I mean, I don't know what your revision process looks like or where it starts from, but it's like every word needs to be there.

Jacqueline Woodson:
Yeah, I don't like extra words. I remember when I used to teach and students would be like, "She wore a purple dress and walked down the street," and I was like, "Why is the dress purple? What does that have to do with the narrative?" I just really don't like extra language because the minute I read a word, I think it's going to tell me something about this story, and if it doesn't deliver, then I get cranky.

What was it like having you as a mom in English class? Was there a rule, like, "I won't be reading any of your papers"?

Jacqueline Woodson:
Oh, they would never let me read their stuff. Never. My kids just don't.

Okay. I'd love to go back to when you first started out as a writer and what was it like in those early days, and what was the atmosphere that you were working in at that time?

Jacqueline Woodson:
It was two different worlds. So there was the world of me working full-time. I had written Last Summer with Maizon, my first book. It was published, got a review in the Times. It got a little traction, but it didn't have this huge life. At the same time, I was writing short stories. I was writing poetry. I was sending stuff off to the New Yorker. It was the age of writers like Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz. It was a very white literary world that I was not invited to the parties of.

It was interesting because I just thought this literary world where you read in New York Magazine about these parties going on and these deals getting struck is not the world of people of color. Writers like Junot Díaz and Edwidge Danticat started getting published. Jamaica Kincaid was kind of out there, but she was not... It was different.

And then I remember specifically when Walter Mosley, me, all of us left Penn American Center because they had some practices that were, let's say, not anti-racist, and so a bunch of people of color just walked away. All of this stuff was going on. I got a fellowship to the Fine Arts Work Center. I was still working many jobs. I had stopped doing drama therapy, but I was doing temp work because drama therapy was taking up too much of my mental space, and I wanted to do something mindless so I could write.

I first got a fellowship to MacDowell, and then I went to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, which is a seven-month fellowship. They give you a stipend, and they give you a place to write. And that's where I met Nick Flynn. I met Tim Seibles, I met all these other writers, and I ended up living in Provincetown for five years because that was where I could write and keep a low overhead. And that's when I really started writing and continued to see the racial divide that was happening in the world of publishing.

So you were and still are in so many different spaces, spaces with writers of color and Black writers, queer writers, children's literature, adult literature. I mean, it's an interesting perspective and a unique one to have seen all of these spaces evolve over the years. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Jacqueline Woodson:
I remember when Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina came out, which was a book I love. I love Dorothy. I love that book. And still, there was not a lot of space for writers of color in the world of children's books. So in that space, I was writing Autobiography of a Family Photo, which was my first adult book. And in that space, I was also writing The Dear One and Melanin Sun and dealing with all of that world. In the children's space, I have Virginia Hamilton, I had Walter Dean Meyers, I had the McKissick I, so I had a village inside the world of children's books, and I wanted to break down the doors in the very white world of adult publishing.

And it's interesting to see many years later how much has changed in terms of the writers that you do remember and the writers that you see. Edwidge is still writing, Juno is still writing, Walter's still writing, and then some of the white folks have disappeared. I remember there was a certain style of writing that was all second-person and stylistic, and I was just like, "This ain't going to last."

And then I knew that there were people who were really telling deep, honest truths in their writing, and that was the writing that I feel like survived. It was a time, I've been thinking about it a lot more because there are so many more writers of color, and I think there are ways in which people don't remember that very divided history that was very recent where, I remember an editor, I'm not going to say his name because he's still in the world, but he said, "We don't publish books by Black people because Black people don't buy books." I mean, at a conference on a panel, I remember Edmund White standing up, getting an award, and saying, "The gay movement is going to survive where the civil rights movement failed." And a bunch of Black and brown writers got up and turned their back on him. People would just say stuff out loud that you would go, "What? What?" It was a very separate world.

Over her long spanning career, Jacqueline Woodson has fought for a place in the industry as a Black and queer writer. She has overcome various hurdles and emerged as a powerful voice with a lasting legacy. Jacqueline now works hard to ensure today's writers experiencing similar difficulties in the industry have more resources. In 2018, after receiving the Astrid Lindgren Prize from Sweden, she founded Baldwin for the Arts, an arts residency named for the renowned American writer James Baldwin. I asked her to share more about how it works.

Jacqueline Woodson:
Baldwin for the Arts is just, it's a residency for artists, artists of the global majority; they just come and be with other artists and do their work. And we pay for everything, their travel, their food, their space, and just give them a space to be in to create. For me, selfishly, it's about knowing that artists will continue to come, that artists will continue to be able to make art, and that our stories won't get erased. And as a very young artist, I just remember pining for something like this, just needing that space where someone says, "I see you. Here's some money to get here. Here's some food to eat while you're here. Do your work and change the world." And the first step in being able to do that at work is having it recognized, having someone validate you. And there's so many spaces that, especially, artists of the global majority end up in, where they're not validated or they begin to doubt their ability just because of those around them who, through microaggressions, through the many ways and sometimes without even knowing it, are making them feel lesser than.

And I mean, today there are so many more artists of color or writers of color who are gaining more notoriety, and it feels like this seismic shift even since I was looking for books for my own kids only 10 or so years ago. But now we're seeing this fight going on in literature and banning books in America. And like you said, it's threatening this erasure of stories and erasure of history. And so as someone who's been around in this sphere and part of this push for voices to be heard for so long, I'm interested in your thoughts on where we're headed and are we going to have to start relying on oral traditions again.

Jacqueline Woodson:
We better. It's an interesting time. I'm not going to say scary. I'm going to say an interesting time because I think, I remember my friend Toshi Reagon said, "We are in a moment where it's like leaving an abusive partner, and this country is the abusive partner, and the closer you get to leaving, the more violent they get." And I think so much of the violence coming down on people of the global majority is about us working to get our independence, which includes the right to vote again, the right to have our children see reflections of themselves in literature, the right to exist in our bodies the way we want to exist in our bodies, the right to love who we want to love, the right to jog down a street. All of these things are very scary for a system of plunder that has for a long time existed in one kind of way.

And so I think the thing about what's happening with books and with the banning of so many books that are primarily books by people of color written to people of color and for everyone, as Jason Reynolds says, is that those books are getting challenged because they're telling the truth about American history. The difference now, of course, is it's getting legislated. It used to be that you just walk into school, and some parents were like, "I don't want that book on the shelf. Take it off," or, "I'm going to steal it. Now it's gone, we don't have this problem." But now, because they're trying to legislate this, it's a different kind of fight.

And of course, that fight is going to happen. Publishers aren't backing down. I know Penguin Random House is suing Florida, and I think more of these suits are going to come to fruition. And I also think, just like with Rainbow Movement of the nineties, where parents ran to get on school boards and do the work to be present in the fight against this, that needs to happen, and that is happening. I think people are finding alternative ways to get to narrative. I know in some places where kids aren't able to read my books, they're seeing the plays of them or watching the Netflix episode or finding other ways around it. And I think that also it's a fight that we need to pay close attention to.

Okay. Let's talk a little bit more about kids. Do you still get to do a lot of school visits? I'm interested in maybe some of the stories or memories that stick with you from your interactions during those.

Jacqueline Woodson:
Yeah, I mean, I still thankfully get to see the young people. I was just seeing them in Block Island and Kansas and Texas and Jamaica and it was so funny because when we were in Jamaica, I was saying that the kids are so intellectually brilliant, and I was reading to them from the year we learned to fly, and this six-year-old girl, she's like, "Well, that's not possible. That would defy the laws of physics." I was just like, "Okay, old lady." But it's just one after the other. Every time I come into contact with young people, and I met Ajada in Block Island who was probably the only brown kid I met there, and she just stayed with me the whole time and wants to be a veterinarian.

And it's just so interesting because I think when kids see these mirrors of themselves, suddenly they open up, they begin to have these conversations that they wouldn't otherwise have. I remember going to a school, and the teacher didn't want me to read from Visiting Day, which is the story of a girl whose father's incarcerated. So of course, I read from it, and she said, "We don't have any kids who are dealing with incarceration in this classroom." And it was a big classroom. And so I read it, and then right after I finished, I said, "Well, I really want to read this because it's about... The girl's dad is in prison, but it's about family and the different ways we have family and people, even if they don't know someone incarcerated, they know what it means to have to leave somebody because there's divorce. There are all these ways in which you have to spend time with." She got that. I read it, and then afterwards one kid raised his hand; he's like, "My dad's in prison." Another girl raised her hand, and she's like, "My brother's in prison. My cousin's..."

About six or seven kids knew someone that was incarcerated. And the teacher said, "I never knew." And I'm just thinking, "Because you never gave them the space to have this conversation." And that kind of stuff, just hearing how kids can be so brave when they have the tools with which to come by it, suddenly there's a conversation in the classroom that they can be a part of and just not even knowing the way that not having those conversations have silenced them. But yeah, I meet kids all the time, and I'm always blown away.

That story about the classroom, though, that's so telling, not asking. I mean, what a moment for that teacher to look inward.

Jacqueline Woodson:
I know, because we set the tone. As adults, we set the tone.

We do, we do. And speaking with a lot of librarians and writers and educators of all kinds, it's always really interesting to have these conversations about giving kids space to learn and having these thoughts prompted. And it really comes down to giving kids more credit. Like in your TED Talk, which has these millions and millions of views, you talk about the importance of allowing kids to read slowly, for example. And you've made comments that I've heard that maybe you would've been treated differently in today's day and age based on your reading as a kid. So I'm curious to hear more about your thoughts on that, if you could expand.

Jacqueline Woodson:
Oh my goodness. Don't get me started. I do think that I would've probably been diagnosed as dyslexic or having some kind of reading difference, and that people would've come along to try to fix it. And that, quote, unquote, "fixing" would've been me reading faster and me not reading things over and over again, and moving on from one text to the next much quicker. And I do know that that is how I became a writer because of how I read. And I do think there is something in our society, sadly, that no longer lets young people be outside of some kind of quote, unquote, "mainstream" that finds that problematic, that looks on a future for them that is not as quote, unquote, "successful" if they don't have these particular tools without looking at an empire that, A, is already broken and dead, and the fact that the job that they may go for might not even be invented yet.

I mean, I think we really have to stop looking at our young people's experience as a reflection of our own, looking at what we experienced and putting that backstory on our young people because theirs is different; it's so different. And because it's different even in terms of the way their brains work with being able to be in so many places at once, right? They're on their computers; they're on their phones; they have three different windows open on the internet. There's so many things going on and us looking at it thinking, "Well, I just sat down and I read a book and I had some quiet time." And yes, I think there's room for that, but there's also room for the way their brains work. Every time we ask them to fix something on our phone, it shows. The minute we need something done, it's like you call a young person because they have those skills.

And I do think that, in this day and age, if I was in a classroom and I was as slow as I was as a reader, someone would've caught that and they would have figured out how to change it. And that change would've resulted in me not being able to memorize whole books that it would've resulted in me not being able to look at a Nikki Giovanni poem and think of a story because I've read that Nikki Giovanni poem so many times that it's almost its own narrative in my head. It would've resulted in me not sitting for long hours just writing and rewriting what seems like the same thing but has been tweaked and changed in terms of its mood just because of a couple of words and grammatical additions.

So I worry, I worry when people say every young kid is a writer, because I don't believe that. I believe every young person has a gift; it's not necessarily writing. I worry when people say that that child is not reading up to the level of the rest of the class, because what does that level mean? And I worry when some kid is quiet and outside of the rest of the group and is getting pity for it while they seem completely happy to be in that place. So again, going back to our own backstories as adults and taking those and looking at young people and saying, "Oh, this must be going on for them because that's what was going on for me," is not what we should be doing. I don't know how to say it better.

Yeah. Quietness and just comfort with that in the classroom from educators. I think it's Knoxville by Nikki Giovanni that you're referencing before, and that's interestingly also what Renee Watson read for her passage in our interview.

Jacqueline Woodson: Oh, that's so funny. And I love that. There's another one too where she talks about her grandmother calls her in to make biscuits and she's like, "I don't want to make no biscuits." And her grandmother's like, "Oh, these kids, these kids." And neither of us say what we really want to say, which is basically that one day the old woman won't be there to teach her how to make biscuits, and she doesn't want to acknowledge that, and that's why she's not going to make those biscuits to learn, and it's beautiful.

What is giving you most hope for the future when you're looking forward and thinking about what you're seeing around you and all these visits all around the country, and just in your world, what gives you the most hope right now?

Jacqueline Woodson:
It's definitely young people, not only young people; and getting back to the phone thing, young people and their tools. I'm thinking about New York has the highest rate of segregated schools in the country, and I'm thinking about when my daughter was in high school and they organized a walkout against this fact and tens of thousands of kids left their classroom and they did it with IG and they did it with TikTok and they did it with Twitter and they got out into the streets and just the way that they know how to organize, whenever I hear them say, "This is the what y'all left us, but we're not leaving this for our grandchildren." Like just the fire.

I just remember being a kid and my grandmother always saying, "I'm going to knock the fire out of you." It was such a southern thing to say, and it was basically saying, "I'm going to teach you how not to be sassy. I'm going to teach you how not to talk back. I'm going to teach you how not to be outspoken, and basically, I'm going to beat your behind." That's what she was saying. If I sucked my teeth, or if I rolled my eyes, or if I said something sassy back to her, and then looking back on it is the idea of trying to knock the fire out of someone comes from enslavement times, and my family descended from enslaved folks, and that idea of trying to break a person, and what I know about young people is they haven't been broken and they're fiery and they're ready to fight for this world and their existence in it. It's totally where I find my hope above all else is just being in intergenerational communities and talking to the young people.

Yeah, that makes me feel good too. It's funny, I was thinking about when we very first started, I was talking about the goneness from Red at the Bone and that idea of you carrying all your memories, all of the things that are like, you're carrying it all, for better or for worse.

Jacqueline Woodson:
So true.

It's very hard to strip out something that comes along.

Jacqueline Woodson:
And I think if you erase some of the other stuff, it might go with it. And I think that's why people have a hard time writing for young people because they're like, "Oh, middle school years were too painful, so I've forgotten."

Yeah. Oh my gosh, yes. Now, I did promise my daughter Flo's class that they could ask you some questions, and they sent in like 500. That was very sweet. Although some of them were like, "What does she think about technology?" or, "Should I call you Jackie or Jacqueline?

Jacqueline Woodson:
Oh, that's so funny.

I was like, "You call her Ms. Woodson." One student asked a great question, which was, "How do your words flow?"

Jacqueline Woodson:
Out of my brain down my arm through my pen into the notebook, and then I read everything out loud, and then it has to flow vocally as well, so it has to sound a certain way. As long as I'm sitting in my chair, they're flowing. I don't believe in writer's block. I think that's fear, and I just write, and they flow, thankfully.

We heard earlier from Jacqueline that she thinks of her own work as part of a continuum of stories and creators that existed before her and will go on unfolding after her. For her custom reading challenge, reading Black, she recommends mostly contemporary books by Black authors for high school and adult readers, with some older works sprinkled in, and invites us to look for the influences and interconnections between these overlapping voices.

Jacqueline Woodson:
One thing I was thinking of was, it's reading Black, right? Reading the books that people are trying to erase, and I was thinking by the time you've gotten to high school, you've read a lot of stuff, and the work you're reading at this point is building on that. So looking forward and looking back, with this list of books, I was wondering what books do these remind them of from their younger period of time.

You can check out Jacqueline's Challenge and all of our author reading challenges at thereadingculturepod.com.

Cicely Lewis, aka the Read Woke librarian in Gwinnett County, Georgia, is back for some more pearls of wisdom today. She just couldn't be contained in one episode. So today, let's first listen to Cicely talk about the importance of read-alouds with high school students.

Cicely Lewis:
I have a program with my special needs, the MOID program, and they come in every Wednesday and I read to them. And we do social-emotional learning, so I read picture books to them. For other students, I read an excerpt from, like an Angie Thomas book or a Alan Gratz book, like a really high action-packed scene to really get them interested, or Jacqueline Woodson or Jason Reynolds book, I'll read from those, and I'll pick a really good scene to really catch their interests. We had a program for kids who were getting into trouble, and they just needed a little extra help, and we were doing restorative justice, so we had a program for them. And I went into that program and started reading to those kids, and I was reading Meg Medina's Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass, and they loved that book. First of all, they loved the title, so they loved that book. So that was a really good read-aloud for them.

Since the time that Cicely created her Read Woke program designed to, as she puts it, get her students to read books that challenge social norms, give voice to the silenced, and seek to challenge the status quo, the word woke has become very politicized. I asked her to share her thoughts on this.

Cicely Lewis:
My heart goes out to all those librarians, but what I always tell them is if you have to change the name but you still are following the principles or you're still providing books that amplify the voices of the global majority, challenge the status quo, then the job is getting done.

So me, my program, the name will never change. I'm not backing down from it. I work in a school where I'm supported, but I do encourage librarians to just continue to do the work. One of my best friends, her mom said something really powerful. We were just talking about being a mom and trying to get things done, and she said, "Did you meet your goal?" You may have had to go around the way and do different ways to get to that goal, but meet the goal, provide the representation for the students, provide the access for the students, and if we're doing that, then that's great. You have to decide, as a school librarian, what you have to do. Woke was a word born in the Black community, and now it's being weaponized.

I just challenge or encourage librarians and educators, classroom teachers, parents, everybody to keep doing the work and try to meet our goal in any way that we can. The word is all about providing awareness about issues that matter that people are actually experiencing so we can develop compassionate and empathetic young people who are going to run this world one day.

This has been The Reading Culture, and you've been listening to our conversation with Jacqueline Woodson. Jacqueline Woodson, y'all, she is a mic drop guest for me, so we thought this would be a good time to take a brief summer hiatus. The next two episodes will be replays of some of my early favorites that you may have missed. I hope you'll catch up on those episodes while we catch our breath and enjoy a little vacation.

Again, I'm your host, Jordan Lloyd Bookey, and currently I'm reading Lone Women by Victor LaValle and Scythe by Neal Shusterman. If you enjoyed today's show, please give us a five-star review. It just takes a second and it really helps, especially on Apple Podcasts. To learn more about how you can help grow your community's reading culture, you can check out all of our resources at beanstack.com. And remember to sign up for our new newsletter at thereadingculturepod.com/newsletter for special offers and insights.

Also, be sure to check out The Children's Book podcast with teacher and librarian Matthew Winter. It's a book podcast made for kids ages 6 to 12 that explores big ideas and the way that stories can help us feel seen, understood, and valued. This episode was produced by Jackie Lamport and Lower Street Media and script edited by Josia Lamberto-Egan. Thanks for joining, and keep reading.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson

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