Member-only story
Jacqueline Amanda Woodson
Jacqueline Amanda Woodson was born February 12, 1963 in Columbus Ohio to a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Her parents were divorced shortly after her birth and she, her brother and her sister, moved to Greenville, South Carolina to live with her grandmother.
She started first grade in Brooklyn, New York, and has always loved English writing. According to Catherine Saalfield, who wrote Woodson’s biography for Contemporary Lesbian Writers of the United States, Woodson displayed “her cavalier attitude toward sex and sexuality very early in her life.
She also displayed her writing ability early. In 5th grade, JW won a poetry contest and was accused of plagiarizing. The first six lines of her poem came from a poem her 7th grade sister had written, but the rest of the poem was hers:
“Tribute to Martin Luther King”
Black brothers
Black sisters
All of them were great,
No fear,
No fright,
But a willingness to fight
In fine big houses
Lived the whites
And in little old shacks
Lived the blacks.
One of them was Martin
With a heart of gold
Not like white bigots
With hearts colder than cold.
He fought for peace
And freedom too
He fought for me
And probably you.
(Saalfield, 583)
Her books are not autobiographical in any way, but the issues she puts into her stories are issues she knows a lot about on a personal level. Some of these issues include absentee parents or parents caught up in their own world.
Woodson was well-loved, but describes feeling that she was living her life on the outside of things. In stories like Lena and The House You Pass on The Way, she looks at characters who are both connected to something (for Lena it is her younger sister and then her friend Marie, and for Staggerlee it is Trout); and separated by something (Lena is separated from others while dealing with the problem of incest, and…
