By Jacqueline Woodson
A National Book Award memoir in verse about growing up Black in South Carolina and New York in the 1960s and 70s, and finding, poem by poem, that you were always meant to be a writer.
Jacqueline Woodson tells the story of her own childhood in short, clear poems: born in Ohio, raised partly in her grandparents' South Carolina, where Jim Crow was still the law and her grandmother taught her how to be careful, and partly in Brooklyn, where the world felt wide open. She's the dreamy one, the slow reader in a family of talkers, the girl who loves the sound of words before she can spell them. Across the poems you watch the Civil Rights era move past the window, you feel the pull between two homes, and you watch a writer slowly realize what she is. Every poem stands on its own, and the whole thing reads like someone remembering out loud.
This is the gentlest doorway on the shelf into hard American history, and the best argument a classroom has when a child thinks poetry isn't for them. The poems are short and unshowy, so a mixed-level room can all keep up, and because it's a true story of one girl becoming a reader and then a writer, it speaks straight to the child who feels behind or ordinary. It carries the weight of segregation and family loss without ever turning grim, and it softly hands every listener permission to write their own life down. It won the National Book Award and a Newbery Honor.