National Book Award-winner Jacqueline Woodson signs two-book deal with Riverhead Books
National Book Award-winning author Jacqueline Woodson recently signed a book deal with Riverhead Books, the same company that published best sellers by Marlon James, Junot Diaz, and Mohsin Hamid. Riverhead will publish a fiction novel and a nonfiction book.
Woodson has been vague about what these two books may look and read like, saying only that she’s “superstitious” and that once it’s known what she’s working on, her writing might not actually become what she wants it to be. Woodson’s last book, Another Brooklyn, was published by a Harper Collins imprint, Amistad, and Brown Girl Dreaming, a poetry/autobiography hybrid book that won a National Book Award was published by a Penguin imprint, Nancy Paulsen Books.
Woodson has had a deep admiration for Riverhead Books for years, and this move leads those who are familiar with both Riverhead and Woodson’s work to speculate that her next two books will be aimed at adult readers and a move away from Brown Girl Dreaming‘s Young Adult audience. One thing that influenced Woodson’s move to Riverhead is the fact that they are a press that is committed to the work and voices of Black writers, and she also refers to the signing of the deal as a return home.
We can’t wait to see (and read) what she cooks up next.