Jacqueline Woodson - "Red at the Bone"

“[A] beautifully imagined novel. . . Woodson’s nuanced voice evokes the complexities of race, class, religion, and sexuality in fluid prose and a series of telling details. This is a wise, powerful, and compassionate novel.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

Jacqueline Woodson discusses "Red at the Bone." A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.

At the Gary Comer Youth Center

About the book

 "Red at the Bone" centers around two families in Brooklyn from different social classes joined together by an unexpected pregnancy and the child that it produces. Moving forward and backward in time, Woodson unfurls the history of each generation to show how they all arrived at this moment and uncovers the role that history, racism and community have played in the experiences, decisions, and relationships of these families With her gift for language that reads “more like prose poetry” (New York Times Book Review) and packs the emotional richness of a narrative ten times its length, Woodson explores sexual desire and identity, ambition, gentrification, education, class and status, and the life-altering facts of parenthood. Most strikingly, "Red at the Bone" looks at the ways in which young people must so often make long-lasting decisions about their lives—even before they have begun to figure out who they are and what they want to be.

Early reads of "Red at the Bone" have stopped booksellers in their tracks. Jamie Southern of Bookmarks in Winston-Salem, NC declared it “a beautiful, gut-punch of a novel,” and Emilie Sommer of East City Bookshop in Washington, DC described it as “searing, immersive, and utterly moving,” determining “this is Jacqueline Woodson at the peak of her prodigious talent.” Not only is Woodson “one of the quietly great masters of our time” (Kirkus), but she has delivered an electrifying, resonant novel. A novel so fully human, beautiful and layered, that it feels destined to become—like its author—iconic.

About the author

Jacqueline Woodson is the bestselling author of more than two dozen award-winning books including the 2016 New York Times-bestselling, National Book Award finalist for adult fiction, "Another Brooklyn." Among her many accolades, Woodson is a four-time National Book Award finalist, a four-time Newbery Honor winner, and a two-time Coretta Scott King Award Winner. Her New York Times-bestselling memoir, "Brown Girl Dreaming," received the National Book Award in 2014. Woodson is also the 2018-2019 National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, and recipient of the 2018 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award and the 2018 Children's Literature Legacy Award. In 2015, she was named the Young People's Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. She lives with her family in New York.