Who Is Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming?

Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming is a delicate collection of poems based off her childhood in Ohio, South Carolina, and New York. She refers to the various places as home, but specifies that she does not know where home truly is. In the short poems, she shares her experience as an African American child in the 60s and 70s and how the civil rights movement, marches, and the Revolution affected her family. While each poem is childlike and emotionally driven, Woodson’s persona as a narrator remains the same as the poems themselves search for her belonging. Through-out her reflections, she begins as the baby of the family, who remains the “other” Woodson girl, until she finds her inner passion for words and writing. As she finds herself through writing, she daydreams and desires to become the prestigious writer she is today.

The vignettes navigate smoothly, even though they are expressed from a childlike perspective. As Woodson wrote this novel, the reader can tell she payed close attention to the differences not just on her personal level but on a social level as well. She does not use offensive language or discriminative references as she speaks of her experiences with the historical events of her time, which shows her credibility as a source. The latter comes when she uses her stories to express intimate, vivacious, and gloomy periods of her childhood into something meaningful of who she is as a writer and how she became who she is as a person. In Brown Girl Dreaming, Woodson expresses how she was always a passionate storyteller, even though her mother would tell her to stop lying or daydreaming. Yet, little did her mother know that she was using her creativity and imagination to express what was going on around her in a way she could relate to and better