The Day You Begin has been so beloved by so many kids in this country and around the world…I’m excited to see it come to animated life on screen, where even more young people can see — through the characters in this story — reflections of their own beauty and brilliance.
—Jacqueline Woodson to Deadline.com
Jacqueline Woodson‘s New York Times bestselling children’s picture book ☛THE DAY YOU BEGIN [pub: Nancy Paulsen Books/Penguin Random House] is getting adapted for the small screen by PBS Kids, Deadline announced earlier today. “The 45-minute special follows four kindergarteners — Angelina, Rigoberto, Oni and Andre — on their first day of school,” reports Deadline. I was super excited and beyond encouraged to learn that Jacqueline co-wrote the script along with screenwriter Dana Chan.
Full disclosure, this isn’t the first time the National Book Award-winning author inspired me. I met Jacqueline Woodson after a reading at Medgar Evers College back in 2016 where she autographed my copy of ☛ANOTHER BROOKLYN [pub: Amistad/HarperCollins]. I nervously shared with her that I’d written a novel as well. “What’s the name of your book,” she asked catching me off guard. “Oh. Um, The Cheating Curve,” I replied. “But it’s not literary fiction like your work.” She smiled and asked me how would I categorize my novel. “It’s more like contemporary women’s fiction.” She handed me back my now inscribed copy of Another Brooklyn and said, “Listen. We need all kinds of stories. All of our stories need to be told.” True indeed Jacqueline. You right.
“For Paula. So cool meeting a fellow writer!” —Jacqueline Woodson
My Autographed Copy Of Another Brooklyn
The Day You Begin Synopsis from Penguin Random House:
National Book Award winner Jacqueline Woodson and two-time Pura Belpré Illustrator Award winner Rafael López have teamed up to create a poignant, yet heartening book about finding courage to connect, even when you feel scared and alone.
There will be times when you walk into a room
and no one there is quite like you.
There are many reasons to feel different. Maybe it’s how you look or talk, or where you’re from; maybe it’s what you eat, or something just as random. It’s not easy to take those first steps into a place where nobody really knows you yet, but somehow you do it.
Jacqueline Woodson’s lyrical text and Rafael López’s dazzling art reminds us that we all feel like outsiders sometimes-and how brave it is that we go forth anyway. And that sometimes, when we reach out and begin to share our stories, others will be happy to meet us halfway.
(This book is also available in Spanish, as El Día En Que Descubres Quién Eres!)
Another Brooklyn Synopsis From HarperCollins:
Running into a long-ago friend sets memory from the 1970s in motion for August, transporting her to a time and a place where friendship was everything—until it wasn’t. For August and her girls, sharing confidences as they ambled through neighborhood streets, Brooklyn was a place where they believed that they were beautiful, talented, brilliant—a part of a future that belonged to them.
But beneath the hopeful veneer, there was another Brooklyn, a dangerous place where grown men reached for innocent girls in dark hallways, where ghosts haunted the night, where mothers disappeared. A world where madness was just a sunset away and fathers found hope in religion.
Like Louise Meriwether’s Daddy Was a Number Runner and Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn heartbreakingly illuminates the formative time when childhood gives way to adulthood—the promise and peril of growing up—and exquisitely renders a powerful, indelible, and fleeting friendship that united four young lives.
