Prairie Lights presents Jacqueline Woodson, author of the National Book Award Winning Brown Girl Dreaming. She will be reading from and discussing her new books for middle grade and young readers, Harbor Me and The Day You Begin (illustrated by Rafael López). She will be in conversation with Iowa City author, Alexia Arthur. Woodson and Arthur will discuss timely issues that affect childrens’ lives and education, stressing the power literature has to keep them hopeful in stressful times.

Jacqueline Woodson is the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. She received the 2018 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award and Children’s Literature Legacy Award. Her New York Times bestselling memoir Brown Girl Dreaming, won the National Book Award, as well as the Coretta Scott King Award, Newbery Honor Award, and NAACP Image Award. Her adult book, Another Brooklyn, was a National Book Award finalist, and her many books for young readers include 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, She lives in Brooklyn.

Alexia Arthurs is an Afro-Caribbean writer and the author of How to Love a Jamaican. Arthurs was born and raised in Jamaica and moved with her family to Brooklyn when she was twelve. A graduate of Hunter College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she has been published in Granta, The Sewanee Review, Small Axe, Virginia Quarterly Review, Vice, and The Paris Review, which awarded her the Plimpton Prize in 2017. She is teaching in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop this Fall.