Esther Sadoff: First Prize for the Women of Ohio 2025 Poetry Award for a Poem on Jacqueline Woodson

An author photo of Jacqueline Woodson "Jacqueline Woodson 02" by Bengt Oberger is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. — Jacqueline Woodson

On Leaving and Coming
For Jacqueline Woodson

In class, we read your book, brown girl dreaming.
And so our own dreams begin.
We trace all the things that make you, you:
from sweet tea in Mason jars, to deviled eggs,
hair ribbons, your eyes tearing and pressed
into your grandmother's apron in Greenville, South Carolina,
to the pine trees in your grandparents' yard.
Later, you make it back up to Columbus, Ohio.
I imagine you sitting with your mother on the
Greyhound bus bound for Ohio, seated on a bench
with your legs hanging, sitting up straight,
eyes fixed on the future, two worlds
(north and south; then and now)
which reminds me how we are a kaleidoscope
of many worlds at any given time.
When I talk about identity with my students,
we map yours first: your loves and losses—
lemon chiffon ice cream, firefly flicker,
cricket songs, Nicholtown, your father’s easy walk.
How the Hocking River flows and circles,
merging again with the Ohio River.
We talk about home. How we can have so many homes.
How home isn't four walls but a feeling.
How a photograph is just one glimpse of experience.
So your words pool and flow like the river,
your words like a strong metal railing
that we hold onto as we drift,
saying hello and goodbye over and over again,
as we move away from our own selves.
Knowing we can always come back.

Who is Jacqueline Woodson?

Jacqueline Woodson is an American writer of books for adults, children, and adolescents. She is best known for her National Book Award-Winning memoir Brown Girl Dreaming, and her Newbery Honor-winning titles After Tupac and D Foster, Feathers, and Show Way. Her picture books The Day You Begin and The Year We Learned to Fly were NY Times Bestsellers. After serving as the Young People’s Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017, she was named the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature by the Library of Congress for 2018–19.

On Jacqueline’s author website, she writes:

“I am still surprised when I walk into a bookstore and see my name on a book or when the phone rings and someone on the other end is telling me I’ve just won an award. Sometimes, when I’m sitting at my desk for long hours and nothing’s coming to me, I remember my fifth-grade teacher, the way her eyes lit up when she said “This is really good.” The way, I — the skinny girl in the back of the classroom who was always getting into trouble for talking or missed homework assignments — sat up a little straighter, folded my hands on the desks, smiled, and began to believe in me.”

Esther Sadoff on Her Poem

My poem is inspired by Jacqueline Woodson and her verse memoir, Brown Girl Dreaming. Though Woodson was born in Columbus, Ohio, she spent much of her early childhood in Greenville, South Carolina, living with her maternal grandparents. Her memoir captures the many moments of change that upend her life: leaving Ohio behind, moving to the south, learning to read, discovering the meaning of home, and finding her own voice.

It is a novel about becoming: about living with the ghosts of the past while forging a unique future. What is surprising about Jacqueline Woodson is that despite her many literary awards and distinctions, her path to becoming a writer wasn’t easy. As a child, she struggled with reading. Today, she advocates for the power of slow reading: taking the time to soak in the power of stories.

What inspires me most about Brown Girl Dreaming is how vast and sprawling the novel feels: how it allows readers (my middle school English students included) to become a part of that story as they ask themselves what they are dreaming of. Woven through this poetic saga are haikus about how to listen, how to speak up, and how to harness the voice within each of us. That voice that is shaped by memory, by family, by love, by labor, and by the power of storytelling.

Esther’s Instagram: @esther_elizabeth1

Women of Ohio