JACQUELINE WOODSON

Diversity is about all of us, and about us having to figure out how to walk through this world together.

I couldn't be a writer without hope. I think I became a writer because I'm pretty optimistic.

I'm usually working either on a picture book and a young adult book, or a middle grade book and a young adult book. When I get bored with one, I move to the other, and then I go back.

I realized if I didn't start talking to my relatives, asking questions, thinking back to my own beginnings, there would come a time when those people wouldn't be around to help me look back and remember.

The idea of feeling isolated is scary to me - to walk through the world alone would be heartbreaking.

The epistolary form is one of the hardest to write. It's so hard to show something that's bigger in a letter. Plus, you have to have the balance of how many letters are going to work to tell the story and how few are going to make it fall apart.

To me, elegy suggests that there is hope, and in some respects you've moved past the loss and are able to deal with it and to write about it.

You can't have too many books featuring people of color, just like you can't have too many books featuring white people.

When I'm feeling frustrated with a story, I have faith that it's going to come. Also, when I first started writing, I wanted to write the stories that were not in my childhood, to represent people who hadn't historically been represented in literature.

I never know, when I start writing a story, what's going to happen, or how it will all get sorted out.

Writers are the history keepers.

I've wanted to be a writer since I was seven, but I didn't grow up in family where people aspired to live as writers.

Labeling is not the best way to get young people to deeply engage in reading.

I don't want my kids to have to walk through a world where they have to constantly explain who they are and who their family is.

The strength of my mother is something I didn't pay attention to for so long. Here she was, this single mom, who was part of the Great Migration, who was part of a Jim Crow south, who said, 'I'm getting my kids out of here. I'm creating opportunities for these young people by any means necessary.'

Being a Witness was too closed an experience. That's what I walked away from, not the things I believe.

Even after Jim Crow was supposed to not be a part of the South anymore, there were still ways in which you couldn't get away from it. And I think once I got to Brooklyn, there was this freedom we had.

I do believe that books can change lives and give people this kind of language they wouldn't have had otherwise.

I didn't have any idea of what I was getting into by going away to college. And I was scared. I was scared of failing. I was scared of it not being for me because I was going to be one of the first people in my family to go off to college.

The conscious imprinting that happens between, say, 10 and 16 is huge. I think it's so important for me as a writer to stay open to the memories of that period because they were so formative.

My grandparents were wealthy; my mom was not. I would walk into these worlds of privilege and then walk back into this other world. My little brother is biracial. So race and economic class and sexuality - these were always issues that were a part of my life.

I feel like I'm a New Yorker to the bone. But there is a lot of the South in me. I know there is a lot of the South in my mannerisms. There's a lot of the South in my expectations of other people and how people treat each other. There's a lot of the South in the way I speak, but it could never be home.

Each book I write is a shout into the silence and a prayer and a plea for change.

My mother was a single mom whose days were spent as a customer service rep at Con Edison in downtown Brooklyn.

As a person of color, as a woman, as a body moving through this particular space in time, I realize the streets of New York tell the story of resistance, an African-American history of brilliance and beauty that, even in its most brutal moments, did not - could not - kill our resilient and powerful spirit.