Brown Girl Dreaming

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Review

• A National Book Award Winner
• A Coretta Scott King Award Winner
• A Newbery Honor Book
• One of TIME MAGAZINE’s 100 Best YA Books of All Time

"Brown Girl Dreaming, Jacqueline Woodson’s highly lauded collection of free-verse poems about her childhood in New York and South Carolina, has language simple enough to be accessible to tweens and young teenagers and more than enough complexity to engage older readers. The winner of a Newbery Honor, NAACP Image Award, National Book Award and Coretta Scott King Award, Brown Girl Dreaming presents the story of Woodson’s experiences living with the remnants of Jim Crow during the 1960s and 1970s.

The author confronts issues like faith, racism and sexual abuse using the elegant, spare language and powerful imagery she has come to be known for." ―TIME MAGAZINE

“Gorgeous.”―Vanity Fair

“A radiantly warm memoir.”―The Washington Post

“Moving and resonant . . . captivating.”―The Wall Street Journal

“This is a book full of poems that cry out to be learned by heart. These are poems that will, for years to come, be stored in our bloodstream.”―The New York Times Book Review

“A profoundly moving memoir.”―San Francisco Chronicle

• “The writer’s passion for stories and storytelling permeates the memoir, explicitly addressed in her early attempts to write books and implicitly conveyed through her sharp images and poignant observations seen through the eyes of a child. Woodson’s ability to listen and glean meaning from what she hears lead to an astute understanding of her surroundings, friends, and family.”― Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW
• “Mesmerizing journey through [Woodson’s] early years. . . . Her perspective on the volatile era in which she grew up is thoughtfully expressed in powerfully effective verse. . . .

About the Author

Jacqueline Woodson (www.jacquelinewoodson.com) is the recipient of a 2020 MacArthur Fellowship, the 2020 Hans Christian Andersen Award, the 2018 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, and the 2018 Children’s Literature Legacy Award. She was the 2018–2019 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, and in 2015, she was named the Young People’s Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation.

She received the 2014 National Book Award for her New York Times bestselling memoir Brown Girl Dreaming, which was also a recipient of the Coretta Scott King Award, a Newbery Honor, the NAACP Image Award, and a Sibert Honor. She wrote the adult books Red at the Bone, a New York Times bestseller, and Another Brooklyn, a 2016 National Book Award finalist. Born in Columbus, Ohio, Jacqueline grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, and Brooklyn, New York, and graduated from college with a B.A. in English.

She is the author of dozens of award-winning books for young adults, middle graders, and children; among her many accolades, she is a four-time Newbery Honor winner, a four-time National Book Award finalist, and a three-time Coretta Scott King Award winner. Her books include Coretta Scott King Award winner Before the Ever After; New York Times bestsellers The Day You Begin and Harbor Me; The Other Side, Each Kindness, Caldecott Honor book Coming On Home Soon; Newbery Honor winners Feathers, Show Way, and After Tupac and D Foster; and Miracle's Boys, which received the LA Times Book Prize and the Coretta Scott King Award.

Jacqueline is also a recipient of the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement for her contributions to young adult literature and a two-time winner of the Jane Addams Children's Book Award. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

• february 12, 1963
• I am born on a Tuesday at the University Hospital
• Columbus, Ohio

USA―

• a country caught

between Black and White.

• I am born not long from the time
• or far from the place
• where
• my great, great grandparents
• worked the deep rich land
• unfree
• dawn till dusk
• unpaid
• drank cool water from scooped out gourds
• looked up and followed
• the sky’s mirrored constellation
• to freedom.

• I am born as the south explodes,
• too many people too many years
• enslaved then emancipated
• but not free, the people
• who look like me
• keep fighting
• and marching
• and getting killed
• so that today―
• February 12, 1963
• and every day from this moment on,
• brown children, like me, can grow up
• free. Can grow up
• learning and voting and walking and riding
• wherever we want.

• I am born in Ohio but
• the stories of South Carolina already run
• like rivers
• through my veins.

second daughter’s second day on earth

• My birth certificate says: Female Negro
• Mother: Mary Anne Irby, 22, Negro
• Father: Jack Austin Woodson, 25, Negro
• In Birmingham, Alabama, Martin Luther King Jr.
• is planning a march on Washington, where
• John F. Kennedy is president.
• In Harlem, Malcolm X is standing on a soapbox
• talking about a revolution.

• Outside the window of University Hospital,
• snow is slowly falling. So much already
• covers this vast Ohio ground.

• In Montgomery, only seven years have passed
• since Rosa Parks refused
• to give up
• her seat on a city bus.

• I am born brown-skinned, black-haired
• and wide-eyed.
• I am born Negro here and Colored there
• and somewhere else,
• the Freedom Singers have linked arms,

their protests rising into song

Deep in my heart, I do believe

that we shall overcome someday.

• and somewhere else, James Baldwin
• is writing about injustice, each novel,
• each essay, changing the world.

• I do not yet know who I’ll be
• what I’ll say
• how I’ll say it . . .

• Not even three years have passed since a brown girl named Ruby Bridges walked into an all-white school.
• Armed guards surrounded her while hundreds
• of white people spat and called her names.

She was six years old.

• I do not know if I’ll be strong like Ruby.
• I do not know what the world will look like
• when I am finally able to walk, speak, write . . .
• Another Buckeye!
• the nurse says to my mother.
• Already, I am being named for this place.
• Ohio. The Buckeye State.
• My fingers curl into fists, automatically
• This is the way, my mother said,
• of every baby’s hand.
• I do not know if these hands will become
• Malcolm’s―raised and fisted
• or Martin’s―open and asking
• or James’s―curled around a pen.
• I do not know if these hands will be

Rosa’s

• or Ruby’s
• gently gloved
• and fiercely folded
• calmly in a lap,
• on a desk,
• around a book,
• ready
• to change the world . . .

• it’ll be scary sometimes
• My great-great-grandfather on my father’s side
• was born free in Ohio,

1832.

• Built his home and farmed his land,
• then dug for coal when the farming
• wasn’t enough. Fought hard
• in the war. His name in stone now

on the Civil War Memorial

William J. Woodson

• United States Colored Troops,
• Union, Company B 5th Regt.

• A long time dead but living still
• among the other soldiers
• on that monument in Washington, D.C.

• His son was sent to Nelsonville
• lived with an aunt

William Woodson

• the only brown boy in an all-white school.

• You’ll face this in your life someday,
• my mother will tell us
• over and over again.
• A moment when you walk into a room and

no one there is like you.

It’ll be scary sometimes. But think of William Woodson and you’ll be all right.

• the beginning
• I cannot write a word yet but at three,
• I now know the letter J
• love the way it curves into a hook
• that I carefully top with a straight hat
• the way my sister has taught me to do. Love
• the sound of the letter and the promise
• that one day this will be connected to a full name,
• my own
• that I will be able to write

by myself.

Without my sister’s hand over mine,

making it do what I cannot yet do.

How amazing these words are that slowly come to me.

How wonderfully on and on they go.

Will the words end, I ask

whenever I remember to.

Nope, my sister says, all of five years old now,

and promising me

infinity.

• hair night
• Saturday night smells of biscuits and burning hair.
• Supper done and my grandmother has transformed
• the kitchen into a beauty shop. Laid across the table is the hot comb, Dixie Peach hair grease, horsehair brush, parting stick and one girl at a time.
• Jackie first, my sister says,
• our freshly washed hair damp
• and spiraling over toweled shoulders
• and pale cotton nightgowns.
• She opens her book to the marked page,
• curls up in a chair pulled close
• to the wood-burning stove, bowl of peanuts in her lap.
• The words
• in her books are so small, I have to squint
• to see the letters. Hans Brinker or The Silver Skates.
• The House at Pooh Corner. Swiss Family Robinson.
• Thick books
• dog-eared from the handing down from neighbor
• to neighbor. My sister handles them gently,
• marks the pages with torn brown pieces
• of paper bag, wipes her hands before going
• beyond the hardbound covers.
• Read to me, I say, my eyes and scalp already stinging from the tug of the brush through my hair.
• And while my grandmother sets the hot comb
• on the flame, heats it just enough to pull
• my tight curls straighter, my sister’s voice
• wafts over the kitchen,
• past the smell of hair and oil and flame, settles
• like a hand on my shoulder and holds me there.
• I want silver skates like Hans’s, a place
• on a desert island. I have never seen the ocean
• but this, too, I can imagine―blue water pouring
• over red dirt.
• As my sister reads, the pictures begin forming
• as though someone has turned on a television,
• lowered the sound,
• pulled it up close.
• Grainy black-and-white pictures come slowly at me
• Deep. Infinite. Remembered

On a bright December morning long ago . . .

• My sister’s clear soft voice opens up the world to me.
• I lean in
• so hungry for it.

• Hold still now, my grandmother warns.
• So I sit on my hands to keep my mind
• off my hurting head, and my whole body still.
• But the rest of me is already leaving,
• the rest of me is already gone.

• the butterfly poems
• No one believes me when I tell them
• I am writing a book about butterflies,

even though they see me with the Childcraft encyclopedia heavy on my lap opened to the pages where the monarch, painted lady, giant swallowtail and queen butterflies live. Even one called a buckeye.

When I write the first words

Wings of a butterfly whisper . . .

• no one believes a whole book could ever come
• from something as simple as
• butterflies that don’t even, my brother says,
• live that long.

• But on paper, things can live forever.
• On paper, a butterfly
• never dies.

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NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER

• NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
• The acclaimed author of Red at the Bone tells the moving story of her childhood in mesmerizing poems.

A NEWBERY HONOR BOOK

• WINNER OF THE CORETTA SCOTT KING BOOK AWARD
• A KIRKUS REVIEWS AND BOOK RIOT BEST MIDDLE GRADE BOOK OF THE CENTURY

“Moving and resonant . . . captivating.”―The Wall Street Journal

• I am born in Ohio but
• the stories of South Carolina already run
• like rivers
• through my veins.

Raised in South Carolina and New York, Jacqueline Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 70s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement. Touching and powerful, each poem is both accessible and emotionally charged, providing a glimpse into a child’s soul as she finds her voice through writing and searches for her place in the world.

Teeming with feeling and deeply personal, Brown Girl Dreaming is the groundbreaking chronicle of Woodson’s journey to storytelling, and a beautiful portrayal of physical, emotional, and spiritual growth.

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