Brown Girl Dreaming

Article in Themes and Reading Activities categories.

JMRL's Same Page Community Read is a community reading program to promote and discuss one book throughout March 2020 by an author featured at the Virginia Festival of the Book. JMRL invites all book lovers in Central Virginia to join this reading initiative. Read and discuss Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson and participate in programs about the book, its themes, and its author. The author will be at PVCC's Dickinson Theater on March 18th at 6pm, and this event will be free and open to the public.

We've selected a list of books, movies, and music in the JMRL collection that will inspire further exploration and enhance your reading. Find more resources and discussion questions for this book here. Find information on programs, contests and more by visiting JMRL's Same Page.

About the Author

Jacqueline Woodson, author of Red at the Bone, 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, a two-time NAACP Image Award 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 the 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.—Virginia Festival of the Book

Read Woodson's biography on her webpage.

Works by Jacqueline Woodson

Adult Fiction

• Another Brooklyn
• Red At the Bone

Young Adult Fiction

• After Tupac & D Foster
• Beneath a Meth Moon: An Elegy
• Between Madison & Palmetto
• From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun
• The House You Pass on the Way
• I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This
• If You Come Softly
• Last Summer with Maizon
• Lena
• Locomotion
• Miracle’s Boys
• Peace, Locomotion

Twixt Fiction

• Hush
• Harbor Me

Children’s Fiction

• Feathers
• Maizon At Blue Hill

Picture Books

• Coming On Home Soon
• The Day You Begin
• Each Kindness
• The Other Side
• Pecan Pie Baby
• Show Way
• Sweet, Sweet Memory
• This Is The Rope
• Visiting Day
• We Had a Picnic This Sunday Past

Related Reading - Fiction

This list of reading includes themes of urban-rural and northern-southern relocation, family, memory, the Civil Rights era, religion, writing, and poetry and verse.

• The Third Hill North of Town by Noah Bly
• Daughter of Moloka'I by Alan Brennert
• The Myth of Perpetual Summer by Susan Crandall
• Trueluck Summer by Susan Gabriel
• Arcadia by Lauren Groff
• The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
• Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
• Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
• One Night in Georgia by Celeste O. Norfleet
• Swimming Between Worlds by Elaine Neil Orr
• Park Avenue Summer by Renée Rosen
• The Good Fight by Danielle Steel
• All the Way Home by Ann Tatlock

Related Reading - Nonfiction

This list of reading includes themes of urban-rural and northern-southern relocation, family, memory, the Civil Rights era, religion, writing, and poetry and verse.

Memoir

• Minority Leader by Stacey Abrams
• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
• The Black Girl Next Door by Jennifer Baszile
• The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom
• Things I Should have Told My Daughter by Pearl Cleage
• The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother’s Life in the Detroit Numbers by Bridgett Davis
• Bone Black by bell hooks
• Dust Tracks On A Road by Zora Neale Hurston
• Negroland: A Memoir by Margo Jefferson
• My Life, My Love, My Legacy by Coretta Scott King
• Becoming by Michelle Obama
• Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family by Condoleezza Rice
• Assata: An Autobiogrpahy by Assata Shakur
• Rabbit: The Autobiography of Ms. Pat by Patricia Williams

North/South & Urban/Rural Relocation

• South Side Girls : Growing Up in the Great Migration by Marcia Chatelain
• Bound for the Promised Land by Michael L. Cooper
• The Freedom Summer Murders by Don Mitchell
• Black Klansman: Race, Hate, and the Undercover Investigation of a Lifetime by Ron Stallworth
• The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson

Poetry

• On the Bus with Rosa Parks by Rita Dove
• My House: Poems by Nikki Giovanni
• Brown: Poems by Kevin Young

50s/60s/70s

• Warriors Don’t Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock’s Central High by Melba Beals
• Hidden Figures: The American Dream and Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win The Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly
• Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement edited by V. P Franklin and Bettye Collier-Thomas

Books for Teens

Fiction

• The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo
• Dreamland Burning Jennifer Latham
• The Silence of Our Friendsby Mark Long
• The Rock and the Riverby Kekla Magoon
• No Crystal Stair: A Documentary Novel of the Life and Work of Lewis Michaux, Harlem Booksellerby Nelson, Vaunda Micheaux Nelson
• Lies We Tell Ourselves by Robin Talley

Nonfiction

• Shout: A Poetry Memoir by Laurie Halse Anderson
• Warriors Don’t Cry by Melba Beals
• Ordinary Hazards by Nikki Grimes
• Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Phillip M. Hoose
• March by John Lewis
• Turning 15 On the Road to Freedom by Lynda Blackmon Lowery
• Bad Boy: A Memoir by Walter Dean Myers
• A Wreath for Emmett Till by Marilyn Nelson
• Loving Vs. Virginia by Patricia Hruby Powell

Children's Books

Picture Books

• Rock of Ages : a Tribute to the Black Church by Tonya Bolden
• A Poem for Peter: The Story of Ezra Jack Keats and the Creation of the Snowy Day by Andrea Davis Pinkney
• Coretta Scott by Ntozake Shange
• Ellington Was Not A Street by Ntozake Shange
• This Is the Dream by Diane ZuHone Shore
• Harlem’s Little Blackbird by Renée Watson
• Lillian's Right to Vote: A Celebration of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by Jonah Winter

Chapter Books

• Serafina’s Promise by Anne E. Burg
• Stella by Starlight by Sharon Draper
• One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia

Longer Nonfiction & Poetry

• The Undefeated by Kwame Alexander
• Before She Was Harriet: the Story of Harriet Tubman by Lesa Cline-Ransome
• Memphis, Martin, and the Mountaintop: The Sanitation Strike of 1968 by Alice Faye Duncan
• One Last Word: Wisdom from the Harlem Renaissance by Nikki Grimes
• When the Beat Was Born: DJ Kool Herc and the Creation of Hip Hop by Laban Carrick Hill
• Jazz Day: The Making of a Famous Photograph by Roxane Orgill
• Let It Shine: Stories of Black Women Freedom Fighters by Andrea Davis Pinkney
• Martin Rising: Requiem for a King by Andrea Davis Pinkney
• Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker by Patricia Hruby Powell
• Poet: The Remarkable Story of George Moses Horton by Don Tate
• Birmingham, 1963 by Carole Boston Weatherford
• Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer by Carole Boston Weatherford