Jeffrey Brown:

All right, Jacqueline Woodson, so give us a couple, of well, novels, if you can. What have you got?

Jacqueline Woodson, Author, "Red at the Bone": I can. And it's so funny because Carlos and I are so much on the same page in terms of the energy of what we're reading.

I want to start with Imbolo Mbue. But her book is called "How Beautiful We Were. And it's a novel about an African village that is struggling against a big American oil company that's messing up their environment. So it's a book about environmental justice. It's a book about family. It's a book about when big American businesses come into communities in other countries and destroy them or set out to destroy them.

And one thing I love about this book is, it's so thoughtful, but it's also funny. I mean, she can get at the humor in some of the hardest places.

Another book that I came by way of accident that just last night won Center for Fiction's First Novel award is a book called "The Five Wounds" by a woman named Kirstin Valdez Quade.

It's a book about a family where the teenage girl Angel gets pregnant, and she shows up at her father's house on the day that he is practicing to play the role of Jesus in the town ceremony.

But here's the thing that stood out for about that book for me. One thing that Kirstin does is, she uses Spanish, and it's never italicized, which I love, because what she's saying in this book is, my language is not other, and this story is not other, and my people are not other.

This was a first novel that really blew me away.

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