Jacqueline Woodson New Young People's Poet Laureate

Shelf Awareness

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson has been named the Young People's Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. Awarded every two years, the $25,000 laureate title is given to a living writer in recognition of a career devoted to writing exceptional poetry for young readers. The laureate advises the Poetry Foundation on matters relating to young people's literature and "may engage in a variety of projects to help instill a lifelong love of poetry among the nation's developing readers."

"Jacqueline Woodson is an elegant, daring, and restlessly innovative writer," said Poetry Foundation president Robert Polito. "So many writers settle on a style and a repertoire of gestures and subjects, but Woodson, like her characters, is always in motion and always discovering something fresh. As she once told an interviewer, 'If you have no road map, you have to create your own.' Her gifts, adventurousness and generosity, suggest she will be a terrific young people's poet laureate."

Woodson has written more than 30 books for children and young adults. She won the 2001 Coretta Scott King Award for Miracle's Boys and the National Book Award last year for Brown Girl Dreaming. In addition, From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun (1995) was named a Coretta Scott King Honor Book and won a Jane Addams Children's Book Award. Hush (2002) and Locomotion (2003) were National Book Award finalists. Show Way (2005), Feathers (2007) and After Tupac & D Foster (2008) were Newbery Honor Books.
Woodson has also won a Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement in writing for young adults, a St. Katharine Drexel Award and an Anne V. Zarrow Award for Young Readers' Literature.