When I started writing Another Brooklyn, I wanted to write about the bonds we share as young people and of all the parables of those bonds. I wanted to set this story in Bushwick — the neighborhood of my childhood, the neighborhood I once knew so well.
A writer writes to hold on. I wanted the Bushwick of my childhood remembered on the page — so I created four girls who were fascinating and foreign to me, stepping far outside of my own childhood. Then I sat them down in a neighborhood that was once as familiar to me as air.
I did not know what August, Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi would do or how they would do it. I did not know who would live and who wouldn’t. I did not yet know how I would feel, or how I wanted to feel, in the end. But I wrote toward the hope and longing for the girls’ survival. I wrote toward the questions I had as though I could plow through them with my own words and emerge more conscious and clearheaded.
Do I know more now? About girlhood? About what it means to be a woman of color, vibrant and visible and adored? About what it means to hold on to that love and then, just as quickly, let it go? I think so. .
Another Brooklyn took me on a journey. I looked up from the finished manuscript a little older, more thoughtful, and ever thankful for the village of women who have supported me as I wrote: my partner, Juliet Widoff; my sisters from other mothers — Linda Villarosa, Jana Welch, Toshi Reagon, Bob Alotta, An Na, Cher Willems, Nancy Paulsen, Kathleen Nishimoto, Kirby Kim, Charlotte Sheedy, Jane Sasseen, Jayme Lynes, Odella Woodson. . this list could go on and on.
My brothers from other fathers — Ellery Washington, Nick Flynn, Chris Myers, Kwame Alexander, Jason Reynolds. . this list, too, could go on and on.
This book wouldn’t be here without my crew from the past — Donald Douglas, Michael Mewborn, Maria and Sam Ocasio, Renée and Emilio Harris, Sophia Ferguson, and Pat Haith.
Tracy Sherrod and Rosemarie Robotham both helped me to shape this novel into something people living outside my head could understand. Thank you.
At the day’s end, a writer lives alone with her story, wrestling with characters and settings, and the way light filters into and out of a scene. The deeper messages often escape her. Sometimes I take for granted the journey through the telling. At other times I curse the muse’s power. But through it all, I live each day in deep gratitude.
— JW
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JACQUELINE WOODSON is the bestselling author of more than two dozen award-winning books for young adults, middle graders, and children, including the New York Times bestselling memoir Brown Girl Dreaming, which won the 2014 National Book Award, the Coretta Scott King Award, a Newbery Honor Award, an NAACP Image Award, and the Sibert Honor Award. Woodson was recently named the Young People’s Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.
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