She Was First

(gentle thrilling music) - When you walk into this room and you see this wall, does it feel like, "I have arrived, I made it"?

Jacqueline Woodson answers with a great, big smile.

She's a "New York Times" bestselling author who sold 5 million books worldwide.

- I'm working on my 41st book now.

- [Soledad] She moved from the South to the North when she was very young, so Brooklyn shaped her, yet nothing defined her.

- New York was just home in this way that was familiar and immediate.

- [Soledad] She reimagined literature for varied audiences.

As a Black and queer woman, her presence also gave her community a voice and a face that had been missing.

- This is so cool to be back here.

(audience cheers) - [Soledad] Her success changed the industry.

- The 2018 Legacy Award to Jacqueline Woodson.

- [Soledad] It was the first time publishers bid for the right to work exclusively with a writer of young adult books.

She was the first.

Oh, oh Oh-oh-oh Oh, oh Oh, oh (gentle music) - [Announcer] Major funding for this program provided by Felicia Taylor, a journalist who dedicated much of her life's work to honoring and celebrating the accomplishments of women.

(upbeat music) - [Soledad] Small black?

- Thank you.

- Ah, your regular!

I'll take some tea.

Oh, perfect.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Bill it to Jackie for me.

(laughs) Do you get up every morning and have a to-do list, like, "Coffee, sit down and write"?

- Yeah, I do.

- You're laughing, but-- - I'm laughing 'cause-- - Some writers do, right?

- I'm laughing 'cause I think, "Yeah, here's my plan, coffee."

(both laughing) - That does not sound very productive in terms of writing.

- Then I can really start thinking about the rest of the day once that coffee's in my body.

But I do try to write every day, 'cause I think of it as a muscle.

And the more you use it, you know, the stronger it gets or it atrophies.

So I do write every day.

- Long before our walk for coffee in Brooklyn, she began stringing words together and crafting stories.

(gentle music) You've said that you knew at age seven that you wanted to be a writer when you grew up.

That seems very young to know your career path.

- It does, and by the time I was 17, I still didn't have a backup plan.

I just loved story from the minute I could understand that that's what it was.

So I loved when people told me stories, I loved when people read me books, and I also lied a lot as a kid, so that helped with story.

- What do you mean by that?

- I would make up stories.

I would get in trouble for making up stories.

And they weren't bad stories, just like if someone went away for the weekend, it's like, "Oh, I went away, too, here's where I went," and, like, just making stuff up.

And I had a teacher who said, "Instead of making it up, write it down, because then it's fiction," and so it started falling into place.

(upbeat music) - What's this picture of?

- That's my sister, my older sister, and my best friend Michael.

He and I are still really close.

And this was my high school boyfriend, Donald Douglas.

This is my great-great-great grandmother on my father's side.

- [Soledad] Where did you get this photo from?

- My aunt's a genealogist.

- Oh my gosh.

- [Jacqueline] And so she sends me photos of the family.

(upbeat music) - When did you start writing where you had something to show your sister, your mom, your grandmother?

- Oh, I wasn't showing my mom and my grandma any of my writing.

I remember as a kid saying I wanted to be a writer and my family when I would come downstairs and they'd be talking, they'd start whispering, and they're like, "We don't want you to go writing this for the whole world to see."

And, you know, I never thought to say, "The characters in my head are so much more interesting than you guys are."

But I just felt like I didn't want them to silence it.

I didn't want them to say, "You can't say that, or you can't say that, or do you really wanna reveal that about yourself or about the family?"

So I kept it outside of the family.

- [Soledad] As a child, Jacqueline learned how easily a voice can be dismissed, even by the people who loved her the most.

But on the page, there were no limits.

(gentle upbeat music) Was it a culture shock to move South to North?

(gentle upbeat music continues) That's such a long pause that the answer has to be yes.

- So when I think about my life as a writer in terms of the geographic journey of it, I never thought about it in terms of the places.

I thought about it in terms of what was important to me from that time.

- [Soledad] You speak so fondly of the South and the North, both as home.

But was it hard?

- I'm sure what I've held onto is the beauty of it, of being from so many places.

I think there was, of course, a lot of struggle in it.

You know, my mom came to New York as a single mom with three, and then four kids.

And then, you know, my grandfather died and my grandmother moved here.

I remembered a definite melancholy to my childhood.

And I think that melancholy came from always missing the place where I wasn't.

"I am born as the South explodes, too many people, too many years enslaved, then emancipated, but not free.

Stories of South Carolina already run like rivers through my veins."

(upbeat jazz music) - Why did you start writing about young people?

- I just love them.

- Some people would disagree with you on that.

(both laughing) - I really do love young people.

I love the way they think.

I love how open they are to change and to understanding the world, and to thinking about a greater good in a way that a lot of us have stopped doing.

- When did you realize like, "Oh, I could carve out this path that doesn't exactly exist in children's literature right now?"

- I think I started understanding my absence in literature from a really young age.

I remember reading "Stevie" by John Steptoe, which is a book I still love, and being stunned that he was a kid who was a brown-skinned kid living in the city, speaking in a dialect that I understood because so many of the people I love spoke this way, and then looking for more of that and not finding it.

That kind of gave me the sense that there was this hole in my life in literature and I wanted to fill it.

And I remember being really young, maybe I was in eighth or ninth grade, and thinking, "This is never gonna happen to another Black girl.

Like, there is never going to be another Black girl, when I grow up, that's going to have to search, and search, and search for the one or two books that told her story."

(upbeat music) - And this is the wall of fame.

- Yeah.

- I love it.

So you've won, I mean, seriously, the big ones.

When you walk into this room and you see this wall, I mean, does it feel like, (whooshes air) "I've made it?"

- That's such a good question.

I don't feel that way.

I just feel like, "Thank you for this.

Thank you for seeing my work."

I have a lot more work to do.

- Please join me in thanking Jacqueline Woodson for her lifetime contribution as the winner of the 2020 Hans Christian Andersen Award.

(audience clapping) (gentle music) - [Soledad] Her shelves are filled with nearly every literary honor.

The Newbery, four times, the Caldecott and the Coretta Scott King, six times.

Made all the more remarkable by how close she came to never becoming a writer at all.

- I read slowly, very, very slowly.

I was that child with her finger running beneath the words, until I was untaught to do this, told, "Big kids don't use their fingers."

- You talked about not being a good reader, being a slow reader.

And in some ways I thought, I feel like that would almost convince you out of being a writer, right?

That there's an obstacle.

You know, it's good when someone else is reading to you.

You slog through the books that you love.

- I love that you use that word "slog" talking about it, because it took me a long time to realize what I was doing was reading as an engaged reader, right?

So I was going back over the sentences again and again until I fully understood them.

I didn't fully understand them until I read them three or four times.

As a child, I knew that stories were meant to be savored, that stories wanted to be slow, and that some author had spent months, maybe years writing them.

And my job as the reader, especially as the reader who wanted to one day become a writer, was to respect that narrative.

- [Soledad] That deep engagement with language didn't just make her a writer.

It allowed her to explore her topics with more depth.

- Jacqueline Woodson's range and courage are matched by her artistry.

- [Soledad] Her book "Brown Girl Dreaming" was a poetic, rhythmic memoir, a breakthrough work that shifted the industry.

- During this process, I learned so much about writing.

Our committee made our decision.

It was unanimous.

This year's National Book Award for Young People's Literature, goes to, I love this, Jacqueline Woodson for "Brown Girl Dreaming."

(audience cheering) (audience clapping) - That was my fourth time as a finalist.

So the first time I was like-- - Very Susan Lucci of you.

(both laughing) - Always the bridesmaid.

- [Soledad] Were you surprised when you won?

- I was stunned.

I was stunned.

So I really thought, "This is gonna be another time and someone else is gonna win it, but we'll have a good time."

And so when Sharon Draper called my name, everyone at my table started cheering, I was like, "Wow, I really won this."

- But one of her biggest triumphs made headlines for all the wrong reasons.

That night when you got your award, your friend Daniel Handler, who's a well-known author, made a joke, which I'm reluctant to call it a joke, 'cause it actually was not really-- - Yeah, it wasn't funny at all.

- It wasn't funny, so maybe joke's not the right word.

- I told Jackie she was gonna win.

And I, uh, I said that if she won, I would tell all of you something I learned about her this summer, which is that Jackie Woodson is allergic to watermelon.

Just let that sink in your mind.

I said, "You have to put that in a book."

And she said, "You put it in a book."

And I said, "I'm only writing a book about a Black girl who's allergic to watermelon if I get a blurb from you, Cornel West, Toni Morrison, and Barack Obama saying, 'This guy's okay, this guy's fine.'"

(dramatic music) - Really wanted to process it and figure out what it was that needed to be said about this, and that's kind of how my mind works.

I wrote an op-ed about it.

They titled it "The Pain of the Watermelon Joke."

That was not my title, for the record.

Basically, I talked about where that joke came from.

Rubbley-ub-dub She wears out all her dubs She rubs and rubs her knuckles right on down to the nubs - And how dangerous historically it had been for Black folks, right?

This whole trope of Black folks liking watermelon, and all these caricatures of lazy Black folks sitting against trees eating watermelon, and the racist songs that were written about that, and the impact it has had on folks, and why we can't just take something without having information and try to make it a joke, 'cause it's gonna land badly, right?

This isn't something we joke about, whether or not we think it's funny.

You make a man want to have To have, to have (midtempo hip-hop music) - Good evening, everyone.

Tonight, we will be joined by Jacqueline Woodson, whose stories invite all of us to cuddle up together, snuggle as a family, reading a warm book, and getting lost in the worlds that she captures.

And now Jacqueline Woodson.

(audience cheering) (audience clapping) - I love meeting the people who are actually reading my books.

It's so cool to be back here.

(audience cheering) - [Soledad] You've said that doing this is your passion, meeting with young people and maybe their parents, too, and talking about writing and your books, why?

- It feels like it closes the circle in the way that when I first start writing it's just me in my brain telling the story that's coming down my arm, and I'm talking to me, I'm talking to the young Jacqueline.

And then, I'm hoping that someone out in the world is going to be on the other end of that conversation, and those are my readers, and so I know they're out there reading the books.

And then, when I meet them and I see their joy and I hear their excitement about narrative, then it feels like, "Yeah."

"Maybe it will be your skin, your clothes, or the curl and the color of your hair.

There will be times when no one understands the way words curl from your mouth, the beautiful language of the country you left behind.

'My name is Rigoberto.

We just moved here from Venezuela.'"

- You can call me Juju.

And to all those aspiring to be writers at this time, both adults and children, what would you say?

- I would say write.

I think the hardest thing about writing is writing.

And you learn to write by being a reader, so the more you read, the more you learn how writing happens.

I would say read slowly, because when you read slowly you're studying how other writers have done it.

And I would say try to write a little bit each day, even if it's for 10 minutes.

But I say show your writing to people you trust, not to people who are going to say mean things about it.

When I first write something, I show it to my beloved and I show it to two friends, and I say, "Tell me only what you love about it."

That's all I wanna hear is all the wonderful things about it.

(audience clapping) Thank you!

(audience continues clapping) (gentle upbeat music) Hi, who is this for?

- Eve.

(Eve speaking faintly) - Okay.

- You've written more than 40 books?

- [Jacqueline] I'm working on my 41st book now, yeah.

- Does that seem like a lot to you in your lifetime?

- 40 books does seem like a lot.

I don't wanna write 100 books, you know, I think-- - Why not?

- Because I don't think I have that many stories.

I feel like I've done the work.

Now, the work, of course, is keeping the narrative in the world.

The first time I learned I was banned was I remember Judy Blume called me and she was putting together an anthology called the "Places That I Never Meant to Be," and it was an anthology of banned authors.

And I'm like, "I'm not banned."

She's like, "Oh, yes, you are."

(laughs) And, you know, at that time, you didn't know.

Like, if a school didn't invite you to do an author visit, you don't know it's because none of your books exist in their library or because they want someone else.

But I learned that there were definitely pockets where my books weren't being included in curriculum, or read, or in school libraries.

- We saw demands to remove books from schools that touch on race and racism.

- You were banned with the best writers of our time.

Yet, there is efforts now, and you referred to it earlier, in terms of will these narratives disappear?

- Yeah, the books are getting taken off the shelves.

It's just devastating, because you spend your life writing these books for the people who you hope will see themselves inside of them.

And now they walk into these school libraries in the class and the place where those books are is an empty shelf.

I mean, they've literally pulled them off the shelf and put 'em into bins.

"What are the words we are using and how are we using them?

Who do we hurt and who do we heal?"

- What do you think is actually at hand in these book bans?

- You know, there is something so powerful in knowing who you are and seeing yourself as a part of the world.

Books allow young people to have ideas about what they can be.

They allow people to understand history.

They allow for conversation and thought, right?

So I think there is a way of attempting to disempower people by rendering them ignorant and making them feel isolated and alone.

I know it's intentional.

I know it's so deeply intentional.

And, again, it's absolutely heartbreaking.

(gentle upbeat music) - [Soledad] What do you do for fun?

- So, I love to cook, I love to travel.

I walk a lot.

I know that's not fun, but that's so much about just emptying my brain, right?

So just taking six-mile walks, 10-mile walks.

I hang out with the people I love.

You know, my kids make me laugh, my friends make me laugh.

I love playing Bananagrams.

Yeah.

- Yeah.

- Oh, so we each get our own little, we have our own little boards?

Okay.

- Yep, so we each take-- - You all played before, but not me.

Okay.

- Yeah, you're the only one.

- Peel, I never thought I would get to this place after... - Peel.

- Oh man!

Oh no.

- Oh, yes!

- [Toshi] It really could be anyone's game.

- [Jacqueline] Sitting across from me is my beloved Juliet.

Tell 'em about yourself.

- I love how she calls you her beloved all the time.

- It is very, very sweet.

- Next to me is our beloved daughter Toshi.

- I am their nuisance.

(family chuckles) - Peel.

- [Sasha] I'm just a family friend.

- [Soledad] Do you have goals for the younger generation?

Do you think about the things that, you know, we're leaving behind for them?

- I'm not worried.

I mean, sometimes I get nostalgic and wish they had some of the easier stuff like we had.

- Like, I asked these girls, these young women, if they were activists, and then they just laughed at me.

- I think the term activist has changed a lot for our generation.

Well, I think that's maybe the reason why we don't consider ourselves activists is because now to be an activist you have to be going above and beyond.

- Like, even if we go to a protest, I don't even consider us an activist, because that's, like, the baseline, at least for our friends or everyone I know.

- [Soledad] Showing up, you wouldn't count that as being an activist?

- You know, I think it's on the continuum of activism.

(Juliet laughing) - To stand up and say, "This is not okay," that's a kind of activism, 'cause it's a choice.

You are making a choice to speak out about a thing.

(gentle upbeat music) - You talked about opening up the industry, your part of the industry, young adult children's books, to an auction, which really changed the model.

- I was the first person, with the help of my fabulous agent Charlotte Sheedy, have an auction in children's books.

- Why did she say that when it hadn't been done before?

- She said, "We wanna find you a home.

We wanna find you one publishing house where you can publish all your books, and that'll be home.

You'll create a relationship with an editor there, and you two will go on to publish lots of books together as opposed to being in this hustle.

And they'll pay you enough money so that you can write full time."

You didn't even have to have a manuscript.

It was like, "Here's Jacqueline Woodson, here's what she's done.

This is only the beginning of her career."

- You didn't tell me your first that you're the most proud of though.

- I think for me the award that really knocked me off my feet was the MacArthur.

Because the MacArthur is not about just the writing, but it's about what the writing has done in the world.

- What did you do with the MacArthur money?

- I had this long dream of starting a residence for artists of the global majority, composers, visual artists, writers, and I wanted it to be at no cost to them.

So I found property, I bought property, I built studios on it.

And, 2019, we took in our first fellows.

In May of 2025, we'll have hosted our 100th fellow.

And, you know, we pay for wherever they're coming from.

And it matters to me, because I felt like it's what the ancestors were saying, "Okay, you did this, how are you going to help someone else do this?"

- It's not a question of giving a Negro equality.

It's a question of making the country grow up.

Does that make sense to you?

- Yeah.

- I call it Baldwin for the Arts, 'cause James Baldwin, of course, like so many other writers, had a huge influence on my own personal storytelling and truth telling.

I feel like when I leave this world, I'll know that I have changed it.

(gentle music) - [Soledad] Is that your legacy?

- I think I might have at one time thought about a legacy of leaving the world different, right?

And in this point in time, I'm wondering the literature is getting erased, how will the story remain?

Because even when they didn't allow us to read and write, we had story.

So how is that storytelling going to remain and move the next generation to where they need to go?

If all these books disappear, you know, what is it that I'm leaving behind?

And I'm hoping that it's the power of story.

When I started writing "The Other Side," I wanted to understand why there was still so much separation in this country, in this world.

And I thought it was a timely book for now, because I'm looking to see where we are as a country and how much work we have to do as a people to come together and to not look away from the injustices that are happening to so many people.

"That summer, the fence that stretched through our town seemed bigger.

We lived in a yellow house on one side of it and white people lived on the other.

And Mama said, 'Don't climb over that fence when you play.'

She said it wasn't safe."

(audience clapping) I'm so excited for y'all's questions.

- Hi, my name is Carson, and this is a grade one question.

At the end of "The Other Side," when you write about the old fence being knocked down, you start with "Someday, somebody."

And in "The Year We Learned to Fly," you repeat, "Somebody, somewhere."

Are those phrases connected?

- I think they are.

That's such a great question.

Go, first graders!

(audience cheering) For that deep reading and text-to-text connection.

When I write, I like the rhythm of certain sounds.

And the thing about somebody, someday, and somewhere, those are all words that make you think of a future, and so that's what I want readers to continue to think about.

Like, what can the future look like?

- Has your definition of success changed from when you started writing to today?

- I think it has.

So when I first started writing, I was like, "I wanna write one book," right?

And then, I realized I didn't wanna write just one book.

And I don't think about the success, I always think about Audre Lorde saying, you know, "We should wake up knowing we have work to do and go to bed knowing we've done that work."

And I think this is the work the ancestors put me here to do, to tell the stories that I'm telling and to build whatever it is I'm building.

I've definitely made a contribution.

(audience cheering) (audience clapping) - [Soledad] In a world that often writes her community out, Jacqueline Woodson is in, and has spent her life writing outsiders back in as well.

Through every word, every page, and every reader who sees themselves in her stories she's saying, "You belong, you are seen, and this is your story, one that deserves to be told."

- "What I believe.

I believe in good friends and good food.

I believe in Johnny pumps and jump ropes, Malcolm and Martin, Buckeyes and Birmingham, writing and listening, bad words and good words.

I believe in Brooklyn.

I believe in one day and someday in this perfect moment called now."

(gentle music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (gentle music) - [Announcer] Major funding for this program provided by, Felicia Taylor, a journalist who dedicated much of her life's work to honoring and celebrating the accomplishments of women.

(gentle music) (graphics whooshing) (gentle bright music)