![]() ![]() One was “Brown Girl Dreaming,” a memoir in verse that would win the 2014 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. ![]() Woodson is a prolific author of books for children and young adults, and at the time, she was at work on a few different projects. But the more she visited the building - traveling across the borough from the Park Slope townhouse she shares with her partner and their two children - the more she felt herself wanting to hold on to her childhood home, one of the first places she lived in Brooklyn after moving from Greenville, S.C., at 7. “My siblings and I are like, ‘Let’s just short-sell it let’s just dump it,’ ” Woodson says. But Woodson did not find herself dealing with a readily lucrative asset: Because of predatory lending that targeted black homeowners, she says, her mother died owing $300,000, and the house was in foreclosure. ![]() Their mother bought a three-story townhouse in the Bushwick neighborhood decades earlier, for only $30,000, and by the time she died, a development boom was spilling over from neighboring Williamsburg, driving up values and driving out residents. When Jacqueline Woodson’s mother died, late in the summer of 2009, the writer and her siblings had to sort out what to do with the Brooklyn building where they spent much of their childhoods. ![]()
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