National Book Award-winner and MacArthur "Genius Grant" Fellow Jacqueline Woodson is one of the nation's most acclaimed authors, writing for children, adolescents, and adults. Weaving together lyrical language and powerful imagery to create rich and emotional stories, her work explores the complex intersections of race, class, gender, family, and American history. With more than two dozen award-winning books to her credit, her bestsellers include Red at the Bone, the National Book Award-winning Brown Girl Dreaming, and the Newbery Honor-Winning titles After Tupac and D Foster, Feathers, and Show Way. Her memoir-in-verse, Brown Girl Dreaming, tells the story of her childhood in South Carolina and New York during the 1960s and 70s, following a thread from slavery through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the civil rights movement.

Among her many accolades, Woodson served as the Young People's Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017, received the 2018 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, and was the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature by the Library of Congress for 2018-2019. In 2020, she was awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Medal, the most prestigious international award recognizing authors and illustrators of children's literature, and then later that year named a MacArthur "Genius Grant" fellow. A recipient of a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship, Woodson is the founder of the Baldwin for the Arts in New York State, an artist residency program providing a safe and nurturing space for Artists of The Global Majority.