Whoever comes to them and gets something from them, that is whose hands they belong in,” she said. Yet Woodson doesn’t think books are meant to be separated in categories. “When I’m writing for young people, is from a young adult perspective most books my publisher targets at adults, they’re told from an adult perspective looking back.” When asked what the difference between writing for young readers or adults, the author compares switching between voices as changing the channels in her brain. After Another Brooklyn, Red at the Bone is only her second adult fiction book. Woodson, best known for her young adult literature, won the 2014 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature with her book Brown Girl Dreaming. In order to portray the stratified families in the book, Woodson needed to mention those organizations, which she called “complicated but necessary.” “That’s partly the reason that they’re there, because they don’t figure in literature, and they’re so important in community” Woodson said. Atlanta-native Jones pointed out that these institutions, namely Spellman, Morehouse and Oberlin colleges, were predominant in black lives but not a subject one often finds in literature. Keeping with the themes of class and black wealth, the authors talked about the stratification that occurs in black institutions. For everyone in this book, they’re somewhere in the middle of being complete,” said Woodson. “When you talk about being red at the bone is all of us being the state of developing, of coming to doneness. The author associates it to being exposed and raw, but also unfinished. The title Red at the Bone refers to the red meat at the tip of a bone of cooked chicken. In Red at the Bone she reverses those roles sending the mother to Oberlin college and leaving the father to care for the child. Woodson said she wanted to challenge the conventions and stereotypes of the teenage black mother that has a baby and sees her life stall and the black father who is not present. Woodson read two excerpts one in the voice of the unexpected child, at the beginning of the book and another in the voice of her father, the day he found out he was to be a dad. income, which inspired the themes in Red at the Bone. Looking at this and other instances of black wealth being destroyed got Woodson thinking about generational wealth vs. The idea for the book came to Woodson when thinking about the Tulsa Race Massacre, a racial violence incident that occurred in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921 in the upscale black neighborhood of Greenwood.

Less of an interview, the conversation between the authors revolved around the themes of class and black wealth, which are the center focus of Red at the Bone. The novel tells the story of two families separated by status but united by race, and how an unplanned pregnancy changes them.

Jacqueline woodson red at the bone