MacArthur Genius Grant Winner Jacqueline Woodson Is Publishing Two New Books
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Jacqueline Woodson will publish two new picture books for kids ages 5-8 in 2022, Oprah Daily reveals exclusively. The Year We Learned to Fly (Nancy Paulsen/January 4, 2022) is a second collaboration with illustrator Rafael Lopez, with whom Woodson created the 2018 #1 New York Times bestseller The Day You Begin. While its predecessor helped children understand and accept that “There will be times when you walk into a room and no one there is quite like you,” The Year We Learned To Fly features a bored, stuck-inside brother and sister whose grandmother advises them to: “Use those beautiful and brilliant minds of yours. Lift your arms, close your eyes, take a deep breath, and believe in a thing.” Woodson says although she started writing the book before the pandemic, it evolved as COVID-19 progressed, and she began to increasingly feel that “we all—especially young children—need some joy.”
For The World Belonged To Us, her second new book to be released in 2022, (Nancy Paulsen/May 10) Woodson teamed up with Colombian illustrator Leo Espinosa. It is an homage, says Woodson, to her own childhood: “Growing up in Brooklyn, it was hard not to find a game to join in on. In the summer, our parents kicked us out of the house after breakfast, and often we played outside until the streetlights came on. We played double dutch, built forts, and chased ice cream trucks until it was time for supper.” Woodson says at first she was writing the book because “I needed to remember all the places in our lives where happiness prevails,” but ultimately her aim in publishing the book is “to recapture, and to share that sense of imaginative, joyful, collaborative playing,” that was in part lost during quarantine.
As a winner of the National Book Award, the Coretta Scott King Award, the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, and a MacArthur “Genius” Grant, Woodson is among the country’s most acclaimed writers. Her 2014 novel Brown Girl Dreaming won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature and the John Newbery Medal. Until recently she served as National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, an honor bestowed by the Library of Congress; beginning in January of next year she will become the Kennedy Center’s Writer-in-Residence.”
“In 2020,” Woodson told us, “so many had to figure out out to imagine our way out of pandemic conditions: crowded apartments, hours of online classes, being physically distant from loved ones…the list goes on. What I wanted to pass on with both these books was the exhilaration and freedom I felt as a young person who always dreamed of somehow, flying.”
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