woodson hadn’t really planned on writing for young people. she had always wanted to write about everything, across genres and mediums; her inspirations were figures like langston hughes, maya angelou and nikki giovanni. but she credits that class at the new school for guiding her to look at the inner lives of children. “I thought, this is where my voice can be heard,” she says. “This is where my voice is greatly needed.”
In 1985, of the roughly 2,500 children’s books published in the United States, only 18 were by black authors or illustrators, according to research by the Children’s Book Cooperative Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Last year, of the 3,653 books submitted to the c.c.b.c., 202 were by African or African-American writers and illustrators, a marked but imperfect improvement. There were many factors in this change, but many in the industry will tell you that Woodson’s decades of writing are among them.
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“She just set a standard for herself and others,” says kathleen t. horning, the director of the c.c.b.c. “I think that when children read his books, they feel that he is someone who is not making the world seem different than it is.” Jason Reynolds, a writer of children’s and young adult books, says Woodson has spent her career challenging the industry to help children understand themselves and their environment: history. nor does she have to be about slaves.” points to woodson’s middle-grade novel, “harbor me,” published last year, a kind of “reinvention of the ‘breakfast club,'” he says, where students meet every week in a classroom to talk about their lives, like that of a child. they fear their missing father may have been deported.
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woodson’s insight into what motivates people, and her eye for capturing stories that are harder to find on the page, emerge even more in her adult literature. “red at the bone” revolves around a teenage pregnancy that unites two black families from different social classes. iris leaves her baby, melody, at her house in park slope to be raised by her family and the baby’s father and tries to carve out an independent identity for herself; The novel takes its name from her yearning for another woman while studying at Oberlin, the way she “felt red to the bone of her, as if there was something inside her undone and bleeding”. We learn that previous generations of the Iris family fled the Tulsa Massacre to settle in New York City and try to rebuild their wealth, knowing all the while how tenuous that effort might be. “Those whites came with their torches and their rages,” says she knows she, the matriarch whose mother nearly burned to death as a child. She “she turned the lives and dreams of my people into ashes. So my momma taught me everything I know about holding on to what’s yours. I know you hold on to your dreams and you hold on to your money.” In July, writer Ta-nehisi Coates took to Instagram to praise the book. “This is the wealth gap as literature,” he wrote. but he never says that. never didactic.” certain issues, he told me later on the phone, can be difficult to communicate directly to people. “It’s become very clear to me,” he said, “that sometimes those things are best said in the form of stories and fiction.”
There is an urgency to Woodson’s writing in the book, as if he wants his characters to reveal the humanity of real-life people. Amid the rise of racist political rhetoric in recent years, she said, working on the novel “was like writing against that tide.” He recalled a conversation he had with his partner, Juliet Widoff, after Donald Trump announced his campaign for the presidency. “juliet was like, ‘this is so ridiculous; this is a joke”. But Woodson was traveling the country promoting her memoir and noting what she describes as “a lot of white anger.” she disagreed: “I’m like, ‘he’s going to win.'”
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