Jacqueline Woodson is an absolute hero of literature and humanity. What a joy and an honor to talk with her about her newest book, REMEMBER US — about two adolescents navigating the changes and dangers of a neighborhood on fire in 1970s Brooklyn.

When Freddy’s family moves to Bushwick, he quickly becomes the daily basketball partner and best friend of 12-year-old Sage. Together, they find relief on the basketball court from the constant threat of arson, displacement, and loss. And they learn about emotional safety amid the turbulence of both their age and their surroundings.

I am thrilled that REMEMBER US is the Onward Book Club’s first featured book for young readers! Though Jacqueline Woodson is a master of the genre, she of course writes for everyone: adults, children, adolescents. And she writes everything: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, screenplays, essays. She is endlessly creative and astonishingly prolific — the author of BROWN GIRL DREAMING, her wildly popular verse memoir about growing up Black and female in the ’60s and ’70s, RED AT THE BONE, which addresses the Tulsa race massacre of 1921, and more than forty other books!

In this conversation about REMEMBER US, Jacqueline and I also managed to touch on a few other things: the phenomenon of book banning, the gift of growing up feeling like an outsider, the resilience of young people, where stories come from and who they belong to, spirit, the freedom and power of girls in sports, how to write about the tenderness of boyhood, how characters dictate genre and form. I loved all of it.

It is no wonder that Jacqueline has won the National Book Award, the Guggenheim, the Hans Christian Andersen medal, and a MacArthur grant, among other honors. She has been both the national Young People’s Poet Laureate and the Library of Congress’s National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. And she is also the founder of the Baldwin for the Arts residency program in New York State, which provides a nurturing space for artists from the global majority to create.

Thank you, Jacqueline, for your body of work, and for this nourishing and fun conversation!

If you’d like to pick up your copy at our partner bookshop, Elizabeth’s Bookshop & Writing Centre, you can find this and all Onward Book Club selections here: https://www.elizabethsofakronshop.com/