Jacqueline Woodson, the award winning author of Brown Girl Dreaming, is currently serving as the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. Her platform is, "Reading = Hope x Change - what's your equation? She once said, " I think young people should not be judged by the level of their reading but by the way a book makes them think and feel. By the way it gives them hope. By the way it opens them up to new perspectives and changes them.”  Brown Girl Dreaming is Woodson's biography. Beautifully written in verse, she tells her story of a little girl born in Ohio, then living first in the south in her grandparents loving home and then in Brooklyn, NY on a busy city block among people from a wide variety of places and experiences. She tells what it's like to move between the slow talking, slow moving segregated south to the fast paced city where she struggled in school-always following just behind her gifted older sister. Jacqueline loved stories and writing even before she was able to read and write herself. Jacqueline Woodson masterfully   conjures the places, the people and the feelings she had as a child growing up with the fewest,  most carefully chosen words, trying to make sense of her world.