The following is the text of the Commencement address delivered by Jacqueline Woodson H’25 at Kenyon’s 197th Commencement ceremony on May 17, 2025.
What an honor. Can everyone hear me? OK? I don't even have any biological skin in the game. My daughter graduated from college last year, but I am brought to tears by how beautiful y'all are. I am so grateful to be here with you. I had a whole speech prepared for you that I've been working on for weeks, meeting with my best friend, Toshi Reagon, who is here in spirit through her help with getting me to what I wanted to say to you. But this morning, after a long night of travel — flying is bananas, y'all; I highly do not recommend it right now — I woke up realizing what I want to say the most is: Do what you love — as long as it's legal and it feeds your spirit. Do what you love, and find a way to have it be the thing to get you through life.
And yes, some of you have trust funds — many of us don't — and can do this without thinking. And some of you are leaving here with huge debt, but note: There is no debtor's prison in this country — yet. But those of you in debt will have to supplement that thing you love. I had to do so for 10 years, but the goal was always to get to what I love full-time as opposed to just in the evenings and the weekends. And some of you will have to remember again what it is that you loved once and stopped believing in doing. And some of you are first generation graduates and your caregivers are giving me dagger eyes because the plan is for you to take this degree, get a J-O-B and get out of their houses ASAP. I've been there as both a daughter who told her mom that she was going to be a writer and a mother whose daughter decided that she wanted to do stand-up comedy.
But when you look at this country and see how miserable folks are because they are not doing what they love and they're doing what they don't love and still not winning, that the promise they had been given was long ago broken, and as a result, in their despair and rage, they are truly trying to break America again, then you know this is not who you want to grow into. Unhappiness sucks and unhappy people try to make the rest of us unhappy. Fear sucks and scared people try to make us all afraid. Afraid to speak, afraid to act, afraid to live as our full and beautiful selves. So do what you love.
I love writing, and I have been doing it for 30 years, which is bananas again. I thought I'd write two or three books. I've written over 40. When I was 10 years old, I thought I'd one day win the Pulitzer. It was the only writing award I knew of at 10, and it was already almost mine. And in keeping with my kids telling me that I'm conceited and me replying, no, I'm convinced, I have pretty much won every other award but the Pulitzer. But I did serve on the Pulitzer jury this year, and we did choose “Feeding Ghosts” by Tessa Hulls. And to choose a first-time author who is Korean and speaking about mental health in a graphic memoir, to me, that's a whole-ass win.
The writer-poet-lesbian-mom Audre Lorde said, “We can sit in our (safe) corners mute as bottles and we will still be no less afraid.” So while doing what you love, say what you know is true. Have the hard conversations. Get closer to each other. I want to dedicate this talk today to Logan Rozos, who with a shaky voice spoke up at his NYU graduation about the genocide and is now not only under brutal attack, but also has had the diploma he earned over the course of his time at the university revoked.
Do what you love, say what you know is true and find your people, if you haven't already, which is where this speech originally began before the world once again got in my way.
(Here begins Woodson’s prepared remarks.)
I want to thank all who have brought me here and acknowledge that the land we’re on was taken from our Indigenous ancestors including the Shawnee, Wyandot, Miami, and Hopewell tribes. May their memories be a blessing and their suffering remembered and learned from. We hold history close so as not to repeat it. While the shouting out of the people who walked this land may seem empty and performative, until we can do better, we will continue to speak their names to hold them always as human and whole and once upon a time on this land — happy. Asumaacha. Inshallah, Ashé,
So yeah, I’m standing here in front of you as a certified Genius. When you receive this honor, you’re only allowed to tell one person. At the time we were at our home upstate — trying to live out the pandemic as best we could. My beloved, a public health physician, was working on another part of the land, and as I ran from our house to where she was to tell her, I had to pass the roadblock that was my then-11-year-old son. So of course I broke the rule of telling one person and told him. His response: But you can’t even do sixth grade math! In the way of 11-year-olds, I’m sure his goal was to humble me.
Needless to say, it didn’t work.
But here’s the thing — I’m sure many of you have heard of the Land and Jarman study that showed we are born creative geniuses. All of us. Land and Jarman tested 1,600 4- and 5-year-olds and found that 98% scored at the genius level. They tested the kids again as they grew up and sadly found that by grade school, the genius level had dropped to 30%, by high school to 12% and by the time they were adults, less than 2%!
When I’ve gone into schools and asked first graders what they wanted to be when they grew up, the hands flew into the air — a dancer, a fireman, a superhero, an actress, a writer. When I’ve gone into middle schools and asked the same question, a few timid writers raised their hands. In high school, almost no hands were raised at all.
Somewhere along the way, their dreams got humbled. Silenced. Erased.
In S.E. Hinton’s iconic and timeless novel, “The Outsiders,” a dying character tells another to “stay gold.” The line is inspired by the Frost poem — “Nothing Gold Can Stay”:
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower:
But only so for an hour
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief.
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
Yes it can, y’all. The genius is the Gold. If you hear nothing else I say in the next eight or so minutes, please hear this. Remember what you loved when you were a child and “Stay Gold.”
And with that said, dearest graduates — In a few hours, you will have gone to Kenyon College. Your experience at this place will, going forward, be spoken about in the past. In this case, as I’m speaking about it, in the future perfect tense.
Future.
Perfect.
As a child being raised as Jehovah’s Witness in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, I was promised, if I did all the right things and served God according to the New Testament — which in the 1970s, for me, was a bright green bible, onion skinned pages worn and smudged from overuse — I would end up in Paradise, a perfect afterlife/after world, that would exist once this system of things was destroyed. What kept me going back to those bible pages and to the Kingdom Hall — the place in which we worshipped — aside from the fact that my mother and grandmother made me go — was, simply put, fear. I was afraid that if I didn’t do the right thing, I would not only die in the fiery storms of Armageddon, but that I would not get to live in that New World, where as a child, I was promised I would be able to pet the friendly lions (I was a cat lover) and have life everlasting. I was never with the life everlasting part cuz that felt like a hella long time to be walking around in perfection. I feared I’d get restless and get myself in trouble somehow at some point. I don’t know — a hundred, two hundred years in, something was bound to go down. And what about my friends — my best friend Maria, my homeboy Michael. What if no one in this perfect new world could jump double-Dutch, throw a hopscotch stone, make arroz con gandules with bistec y Cebolla, or chase the Piragua man (who was not a Witness so wouldn’t even be there) — or dance the merengue, do the hustle, or downlow sing along to “Play That Funky Music.” What if in this new world like in the old one, I wasn’t allowed to say “funky.” I had questions that the bright green bible couldn’t answer. And it would be another 20 years before I had access to a thing that would be invented and called “the world wide web.” And yet, six out of seven days a week, fear marched me into the religion, my brow furrowed with both worry and so many unanswered questions.
I can’t go back to the Bushwick of my childhood — it isn’t there anymore. Yes, my childhood home on my childhood block remains and even with this country’s history of redlining, racially restrictive covenants, predatory lending and deed theft, the house, by some miracle of the ancestors, remains in my family, I can’t go back to the neighborhood I grew up in. It’s no longer there. In the decades since I left for college, the neighborhood changed. My block, that had once been home to Black folks coming to Brooklyn via the great migration and immigrants coming from Central and South America, and Puerto Ricans moving to the mainland, is now a neighborhood wearing the beauty and the bruises of gentrification. The Sufi poet, Rumi, said: Friend, wherever you place your feet, feel me, in the ground beneath you.
I think of this wherever I go. I feel the people who have been displaced to make room for me. I feel the people who built the homes, laid the sidewalks, fell to their death creating a bridge that connected us across the boroughs. There is no place we walk that someone else hasn’t walked before.
But … and … I was talking about fear. Fear has a power, even when you’re deeply knowing, to make you stutter step, second-guess yourself, ask the wrong questions. Or even worse — ask no questions. At all
But you all already know this. Because already, with not even a quarter of a century to most of y’all’s names, your knowing has already passed that of us, your elders. You, my beautiful and brilliant young people of all genders, understand what is happening in this country and in this world and you, my beautiful and brilliant graduates of Kenyon College, already know you are not here for it. Already, you understand not only the technology of the “internets.” We know this because we stay asking you to show us how to create docs on Canva and unkink our phones and make TikTok videos with us dancing off beat — the list goes on.
But you also understand the technology of movement and liberation. You are the most knowing generation that has ever lived. And you know what your truths are. Your brow isn’t furrowing with the weight of fear and unanswered questions. You know the answer. You know the right thing to do. You are standing in clarity inside a world that is in the midst of catastrophic violence. But you have AI.
Ancestral Intelligence. You have the generations before you who had to face times like this. SO, you not only have all the knowing from your own generation, but you also have the strategies and the know-how of all who made a way before you. Your ancestors had to make a way out of no way — surviving enslavement, pogroms, wars, famines, anti-miscegenation laws, illegal abortions, ALL the isms — the list goes on. And because of this, aside from what you know to be deeply true in both your head and your heart, you have the technology of movement, resistance, truth, and freedom in your DNA! If you stand in alignment with the natural world, then you are in Excellent company in these trying times. And yes, you can want both the lion and the Piragua man!
Decades ago, I wrote a book called “The Other Side,” the story of two girls — one Black, one white, who lived in a town that was segregated by a literal fence running through it. In the end, while the fence remained standing, the girls freely crossed it to play — ignoring their parents' warning — that the other side was “unsafe,” ignoring the jeers of other kids who obeyed the “rules.” The girls in the book, Annie and Clover, all of 8 or 9 years old, didn’t have the physical strength to knock that fence down, but they realized they didn’t need to. That the fence was powerless against their will. Years later, when grown-ups asked me if I thought the fence was down in this country, I told them to look into their homes — that’s where the answer was. If they could remember the last time they had dinner with someone of a different race, then maybe the fence was down in their life. Not lunch — because you eat lunch with co-workers and college folks. But what happens in your own home? Does your haven have a fence running through it? Who does the fence keep in? And out?
As a writer I’ve spent decades writing about fear and belonging. As an elder watching the new/old ways in which fear is being used to divide us, I must once again bring this back to the people who came before us who built systems of mobilization that kept them whole. And got them through. What I see in all of you is what I see in all young people — an Intimacy of Absolute Goodness. The way you don’t not want your earth destroyed. The way you fight against genocide and all oppressions. The way you believe in the autonomy of your own bodies and know the difference between governments and communities and how good governments nurture and care for the communities they serve. The way you know the work isn’t easy but you’re here for it.
At an Eid banquet back in March, the Iman asked us to look around. There were nearly 300 people in the room. He said, “Everyone in this room is a person who is walking alongside you, a person you can be honest with, a person you can trust.”
I’m not going to ask y’all to do that — to look to your left and your right and make eye contact and what not because I always cringe when folks ask that of me. The Iman didn’t ask that of us either. He said, “Look around you.” And what he was saying, or rather what I heard was: You have found your people. Exhale now.
And I guess, that’s what I really want to say to you today — Find your people and gather with them as often as you possibly can.
Find your people — the one who you can sit with, dance with, laugh with, march with, sleep with — all the things!! In other words, find the folks who you can begin to do your work with and change the world with and grow old with. I am still friends with the folks I marched in ACT Up with in the ’80s, and against the many wars of the ’90s, and built collectives with and started families with and wrote anthologies with. I am still friends with the people I couldn’t stand once. Who broke my heart once. Who slept with the first second third love of my life. I’m still friends with the people whose politics had me truly believing we were raised on different planets.
Find your people and your practices. Keep the practices simple but keep them going.
This world is a lot of things, but it doesn’t have to be a world any of you, with your beautiful and brilliant and knowing selves, should have to ever walk through, or march through, or change — alone.
Find your people — Cross over that mirage of a fence and learn how to play spades or mahjong or pickle ball — whatever. The scariest thing on the other side of that fence is a New Old World. Probably no lions you can pet but … Your people will be there.
There is no perfect future ahead of us. But there is Future Perfect. You will have found your people. And so much laughter. And here and there still, if you look for it, you will have found some gold.