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Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson (from PW)
I found out earlier today that one of my favorite authors, Jacqueline Woodson, is going to be the YA luncheon speaker at IRA and was thrilled! Then, quite prophetically, I found a great interview with her by Publishers Weekly. Below is an excerpt in which she talks about her newest book, Beneath a Meth Moon (due out in February), and what she is working on. Read the entire interview here.
 
Are you currently mining any memories for another writing project?
 
I feel like I’m still coming out of the fog of finishing Beneath a Meth Moon. I don’t think I realized how inside that story I really was. It was a hard and heavy book to write. But I’ve finished a picture book, Each Kindness, which E.B. Lewis is illustrating and Nancy Paulsen Books will publish in fall 2012. I was inspired by seeing third- and fourth-grade girls being so mean to each other and not even realizing that’s what they were doing. I remember thinking, “They think this moment is always going to be here, that there will always be a chance to go back and undo that.” And it’s not true. So Each Kindness is about a girl who isn’t kind and what happens with that. It’s about the importance of kindness—something I deeply believe in.
 
I’m also about to start writing the book for an opera about Clementine Hunter, an African-American painter from Louisiana whose work was shown at galleries that she wasn’t allowed to enter because of Jim Crow laws. And another project that is slowly coming together for me is a middle-grade novel which will be quite funny.

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