Jacqueline Woodson's books are such a gift to parents and children for their poignant subtlety and lyricism and their willingness to let a reader dwell in the pangs of realization that we sometimes try to protect our children from.
Interpretation
Tracy K. Smith praises Jacqueline Woodson's work for its emotional depth and ability to confront difficult truths about childhood and parenting.
This quote highlights the value of Jacqueline Woodson's literature, emphasizing its subtle and lyrical nature. It suggests that her books provide a thoughtful exploration of the complexities of childhood and parenting, offering readers an opportunity to reflect on the challenges and emotional realities that children face, which parents often try to shield them from. Through her poignant storytelling, Woodson encourages readers to engage with these difficult truths, fostering a deeper understanding of both the joys and struggles inherent in family life.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the importance of children's literature in understanding complex emotions.
We all need poetry. The moments in our lives that are characterized by language that has to do with necessity or the market, or just, you know, things that take us away from the big questions that we have, those are the things that I think urge us to think about what a poem can offer.
I wanted to write the kind of poetry that people read and remembered, that they lived by - the kinds of lines that I carried with me from moment to moment on a given day without even having chosen to.
I love the sense of looking at the sad, paltry, and yet very familiar spectacle that we must make from moment to moment in our lives, and in our frenzy, as something that's as out there as alien life.
Losing my father made me want to find out if I could come up with a version of God or the afterlife that I could feel like was acceptable now that both my parents are in it.
Prose is something that is persistent in staying in one place long enough to not only zero in on the dramatic effect of something that might have happened, or something that might have been seen, but also in watching how it played out and thinking about the cause and the effect.
A question is a pursuit, an invitation to envision and explore a series of possibilities, to struggle and empathize and doubt and believe. The question moves, whereas our sense of what an answer is can often be static, a stopping point.
Teach them the quiet words of kindness, to live beyond themselves. Urge them toward excellence, drive them toward gentleness, pull them deep into yourself, pull them upward toward manhood, but softly like an angel arranging clouds. Let your spirit move through them softly.
I am suspicious of writers who go looking for issues to address. Writers are neither preachers nor journalists. Journalists know much more than most writers about what's going on in the world. And if you want to change things, you do journalism.
The goal of education is not to increase the amount of knowledge but to create the possibilities for a child to invent and discover, to create men who are capable of doing new things.
Faults in English prose derive not so much from lack of knowledge, intelligence or art as from lack of thought, patience or goodwill.
No child in Africa, and in fact anywhere in the world, should be denied education.
In college, I was an education major and qualified for several jobs. But the fame that came with the Olympic medals was too threatening to many people.
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