In young adult novels and children's books, you stay in moment. The story goes through a school year or a weekend. You never get a sense of a future self because the young person has not lived that yet.

Each book I write is a shout into the silence and a prayer and a plea for change.

As a child in South Carolina, I spent summers like so many children - sitting on my grandparents' back porch with my siblings, spitting watermelon seeds into the garden or, even worse, swallowing them and trembling as my older brother and sister spoke of the vine that was probably already growing in my belly.

'Brown Girl Dreaming' was a book I had a lot of doubts about - mainly, would this story be meaningful to anyone besides me? My editor, Nancy Paulsen, kept assuring me, but there were moments when I was in a really sad place with the story for so many reasons. It wasn't an easy book to write - emotionally, physically, or creatively.

The epistolary form is one of the hardest to write. It's so hard to show something that's bigger in a letter. Plus, you have to have the balance of how many letters are going to work to tell the story and how few are going to make it fall apart.

I love playing with form. I love playing with sounds... I love music, and I love writing that has a musicality to it.

What I write comes from a place of deep love, and a deep understanding of all kinds of otherness.

My writing is inspired by where I come from, where I am today, and where I hope to go some day.

The civil rights movement was about access to public space. We had to fight for public space.

Reading equals hope times change.

As a person of color, as a woman, as a body moving through this particular space in time, I realize the streets of New York tell the story of resistance, an African-American history of brilliance and beauty that, even in its most brutal moments, did not - could not - kill our resilient and powerful spirit.

Friendship is such an important thing to me, and I feel like the people who I love and help keep me whole - I can't imagine a life without them.

I didn't have any idea of what I was getting into by going away to college. And I was scared. I was scared of failing. I was scared of it not being for me because I was going to be one of the first people in my family to go off to college.

I've wanted to be a writer since I was seven, but I didn't grow up in family where people aspired to live as writers.

I still love Carson McCullers and Raymond Carver and Toni Morrison and James Baldwin.

In the midst of observing the world and coming to consciousness, I was becoming a writer, and what I wanted to put on the page were the stories of people who looked like me.

I'm inspired by questions I have that I try to figure out the answers to through my writing.

Both racism and homophobia come from a sense of the presumed and the unknown.

I feel like, as a person of color, I've always been kind of doing the work against the tide.

Young people are often ignored and disregarded, but they are acute observers and learners of everything we say and do.

If you have no road map, you have to create your own.

I think when I was a young person, there was just kind of - there was very little dialogue about it. And there was just kind of one way to be gay, right? You saw very effeminate guys. You saw very butch women. And there was no kind of in-between. And there was no - you know, there wasn't anything in the media. There wasn't anything on television.

Memory doesn't come as a straight narrative. It comes in small moments with all this white space.

My sister taught me how to write my name when I was about three. I remember writing my whole name: Jacqueline Amanda Woodson. I just loved the power of that, of being able to put a letter on the page and that letter meaning something.