ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND MODERATOR

JACQUELINE WOODSON is the recipient of the 2020 Hans Christian Andersen Award, the 2018 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, and the 2018 Children’s Literature Legacy Award, and she was the 2018–2019 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. Her New York Times bestselling memoir Brown Girl Dreaming won the National Book Award, as well as the Coretta Scott King Award, a Newbery Honor, and the NAACP Image Award. She also wrote the adult books Red at the Bone, a New York Times bestseller, and Another Brooklyn, a 2016 National Book Award finalist. Her dozens of books for young readers include Before the Ever After, New York Times bestsellers The Day You Begin and Harbor Me, Newbery Honor winners Feathers, Show Way, and After Tupac and D Foster, and the picture book Each Kindness, which won the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award.

JULIA E. TORRES is a veteran language arts teacher and librarian in Denver, Colorado. Julia facilitates teacher development workshops rooted in the areas of antiracist education, equity and access in literacy and librarianship, and education as a practice of liberation. Julia works with students and teachers locally and around the country with the goal of empowering them to use literacy to fuel resistance and positive social transformation. Julia also serves on several local and national boards and committees promoting educational equity and progressivism. She is the current NCTE Secondary Representative-at-large, an Educolor Collective steering committee member, a Book Love Foundation board member and an Educator Collaborative Book Ambassador.

About the National Day on Writing®

Writing is an important part of life. It allows us to communicate and collaborate, to think and learn, to celebrate and share our voices, our struggles, our experiences.

The National Day on Writing® celebrates writing—and the many places, reasons, and ways we write each day—as an essential component of literacy. Since 2009, #WhyIWrite has encouraged thousands of people to lift their voices and share why and when and how they write.

NCTE invites you to join our 2020 National Day on Writing on October 20 and tell us about what compels you to pick up a pen, sharpen a few pencils, dust off the chalk, find a marker that works, or tap your keyboard. Won’t you join the conversation? Tell us why YOU write. Use the hashtag #WhyIWrite on your favorite social media platforms on October 20.

Why I Write T-shirts for 2020 can be purchased here. To see some of Jacqueline’s books and other books from authors who participated in The National Day on Writing® please see our Bookshop.org page. (NCTE and independent bookstores will receive a small commission from purchases made using this link. Thank you!)