Naylor, Gloria. “A Conversation between Gloria Nay-
lor and Toni Morrison.” Southern Review 21, no. 3
(Summer 1985): 567–593.
“The Women of Brewster Place.” Ebony, March 1989,
pp. 122–124, 126.
Loretta Gilchrist Woodard
Woods, Vergible See TEA CAKE.
Woodson, Jacqueline Amanda
(1963– )
Born in Columbus, Ohio, on February 12, 1963,
Woodson grew up in Greenville, South Carolina,
and in Brooklyn, New York. Living in an ethni-
cally and culturally diverse community enriched
her life and served as a well from which she drew
inspiration to craft characters from various ethnic
groups and social classes. She received a bachelor’s
degree in English and worked as a children’s drama
therapist for runaways and homeless children in
New York City before she became an author. Her
writing summons readers to wrestle with myriad
issues, including lesbian parenting, child abuse,
and teenage pregnancy.
In 1990, Jacqueline Woodson published her
first young adult novel, Last Summer with Maizon.
Woodson’s work includes The House You Pass on
the Way (Puffin, 2003), If You Come Softly (Put-
nam, 1998), I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This (Dela-
corte, 1994), From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun
(Scholastic, 1997), the Maizon trilogy—Last Sum-
mer with Maizon (Delacorte, 1990), Maizon at Blue
Hill (Delacorte, 1992), and Between Madison and
Palmetto (Delacorte, 1993), Behind You (Putnam
Juvenile, 2004)—and The Dear One (Delacorte,
1991). Her picture books include Coming On Home
Soon, Sweet, Sweet Memory (Jump at the Sun/Hy-
perion, 2000), We Had a Picnic This Sunday Past
(Hyperion, 1998), and The Other Side (G. P. Put-
nam’s Sons, 2001), which won the Texas Blue Bon-
net Award and a Child Magazine Best Book Award.
She edited A Way Out of No Way: Writings about
Growing Up Black in America (Henry Holt, 1996),
a collection of stories about children. Woodson’s
novels Hush (Putnam, 2002) and Locomotion (Put-
nam, 2003) were both finalists for the National
Book Award for Young People’s Literature.
In her work, Woodson adeptly transports
readers into adolescent worlds, navigating with
authentic emotions, observations, and insight
communicated through her prose. “With each
book, Woodson has taken a risk—confronting
issues of race, class, teenage pregnancy and inter-
racial and gay relationships—and her sympathetic
characters make the big questions more accessible
for teens to examine,” says critic Jennifer Brown.
Woodson has been a fellow at the MacDowell
Colony and the Fine Arts Work Center in Prov-
incetown, Massachusetts. She has been a visiting
writer in the Goddard College M.F.A. writing pro-
gram and has taught creative writing in the gradu-
ate program at City College.
Woodson has received four Coretta Scott King
Honors, a Coretta Scott King Award, the Los An-
geles Times Book Award, two Jane Addams Peace
Awards, three Lambda Literary Awards, a Granta
Best Writer Under Forty Award, Publisher’s Weekly
Best Book of 1994, and a number of American
Library Association Best Book Awards. Miracle’s
Boys (Putnam, 2000), a touching story about three
parentless brothers, earned the author a Coretta
Scott King Award for Fiction. It debuted in Febru-
ary 2005 as a miniseries directed by LeVar Burton.
Woodson lives in Brooklyn with her partner and
their daughter Toshi.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bashir, Samiya A. “Tough Issues, Tender Minds—Jac-
queline Woodson—Critical Essay.” Black Issues
Book Review 3, no. 3 (May 2001): 78.
Brown, Jennifer. “From Outsider to Insider.” Publish-
ers Weekly (February 2002).
Jeannine F. HunterWright, Charles Stevenson (1932– )
Wright was born and reared in segregated New
Franklin, a small midwestern town near Colum-
bia, Missouri, to Stevenson and Dorothy Hughes
Wright. By the time Wright was four years old, his562 Woods, Vergible