At Vanity Fair: Jacqueline Woodson on the Revelatory James Baldwin

Jacqueline Woodson, The Poetry Foundation's Young People’s Poet Laureate--and the author of over 30 books--has written about the importance of James Baldwin for none other than Vanity Fair!
"The ordinary black lives he brought to the page were revelatory," writes Woodson. More from this piece:

For many in the worlds I moved in—both that of my childhood and young adulthood—Baldwin was not yet a household name. We saw him at the edges of black-and-white videos of the civil-rights movement, heard his name lumped together with other “gay” writers—Lorde, Capote, Williams, Cather, Baldwin . . . And when the subject of Ebonics resurfaced nearly 10 years after his death, we turned back to his essays from the 60s and realized he had been talking about sexuality, language, race, and class long before many of us were born. Still, as a young writer what I had been most fascinated by were the “chances” Baldwin took—his ferocity, his fearlessness. (Decades later, these attributes still resonate as there seems to be a Baldwin revival happening right now. Carl Hancock Rux recently staged his mesmerizing Stranger on Earth, imagining a meeting between Baldwin and vocalist Dinah Washington. Educators are battling to get Baldwin back on school curricula. Scholars and writers are rallying around his legacy. His interviews and quotes are flooding social media.)

After Baldwin’s death, I lay in bed rereading (by then I had lost count of how many times) Giovanni’s Room, a tiny volume I’d move with me from my mother’s house to college to my first apartment. We were years away from fighting for marriage equality, a struggle as foreign to me at the time as trans rights or Black Lives Matter. As Dyke Slope became Park Slope again and the price of rent skyrocketed, as thousands (including Liberace and Michael Bennett) died from H.I.V.-related illnesses, as members of ACT UP fought hard to get the F.D.A. to approve other drugs besides AZT, so many of us were simply trying to survive. In the midst of this, I lost a source of strength and light: Baldwin died from stomach cancer at the age of 63.

Having become intrigued by everything he wrote, I moved on to finding pictures and films about him...

Find it all at Vanity Fair.