Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson (born 1963) is one of the most decorated writers in American letters for young readers and adults alike: her verse memoir Brown Girl Dreaming won the 2014 National Book Award, and her honors span the Young People’s Poet Laureate post (2015), National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature (2018–2019), a MacArthur “genius” fellowship (2020), and acclaimed adult novels including Another Brooklyn and Red at the Bone.

Suing Meta over Llama

In December 2023 Woodson joined Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and fellow writers as a named plaintiff in Kadrey v. Meta in the Northern District of California. The suit alleges Meta torrented millions of pirated books from shadow libraries such as LibGen and Z-Library to train its Llama models, ignoring employees’ warnings about “illegal pirated websites” and abandoning licensing talks because stolen copies were free — with the choice escalated to Mark Zuckerberg for approval.

Judge Vince Chhabria granted Meta summary judgment on fair use in June 2025, but stressed the narrowness of the win: the ruling “does not stand for the proposition that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful,” only that these thirteen authors had not proven market harm. Woodson has not made AI a public cause beyond the case; for a writer whose life’s work is teaching children the value of slow, human storytelling, the signature on the complaint is the statement.