Theme 3: Growing Up

Meet the Author

Although she was born in Ohio, Jacqueline Woodson grew up in South Carolina and in Brooklyn, New York, where she still lives. When she was a child, her Brooklyn neighbors were mostly Hispanic and African American. “Everything from the food I grew up eating to the music I learned to dance to had the flavors of both the South and Puerto Rico,” she remembers. This background has served her well as a writer because the characters in her fiction are from a variety of ethnic groups and social classes.