In 2004, Jacqueline Woodson was sitting in a coffee shop in Brooklyn, New York, when she overheard two young girls chatting. They were discussing a recent school field trip to see the Statue of Liberty. One of the girls said she had never seen anything so big. The other girl told her that the Statue of Liberty wasn’t actually that big—it was just really tall.
The conversation stayed with Woodson and inspired her to write Brown Girl Dreaming, a novel in verse about growing up African American in the 1960s and ‘70s.
Woodson wanted to capture the experience of being a black girl in America—an experience that is often left out of history books. “I thought, ‘Wow, if these little girls are unaware of how important our stories are, then maybe there are other people who don’t know either,'” she said in an interview with Scholastic.
Brown Girl Dreaming tells the story of Woodson’s childhood, from moving down South to protesting against racial injustice. It won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature in 2014 and has been praised for its beauty and honesty.