Born on April 24, 1988, Jasmine Warga is an American children’s and young adult book author who is world-famous for her verse book Other Words for Home.
The book also received a Newbery Honor in the year 2020. She completed her graduation from Northwestern University with a degree in history and art history. Warga also owns a 6-year experience in teaching.
Her work includes My Heart and Other Black Holes (2015), Here We Are Now (2017), Other Words for Home (2019), The Shape of Thunder (2021).
Below are some shreds of her writings:
- He’s no longer the person I want to die with; he’s the person I want to be alive with.
- I wonder what it will feel like when all the lights go off, and everything is quiet forever. I don’t know if it will be painful if, in those last moments, I’ll be scared, but all I can hope is that it will be over fast. That it will be peaceful. That it will be permanent.
- I will be stronger than my sadness.
- I want to understand. I like understanding you. It’s been a long time since I related to someone else, but I think I get you.
- He put his hand out, and I grab it. His grip is weak and loose, unlike when he squeezed my hand at the carnival. And this time, I can feel my hand. I can feel everything. And I want to keep feeling everything. Even the painful, awful, terrible things. Because feeling things is what lets us know that we’re alive. And I want to be alive.
- I try to imagine him without the grief, without the heaviness, without the frozenness, but it’s hard to see him as anything other than desperately sad. Yes, he looks like someone who was designed to be popular and successful, but he also looks like someone who was made to wear grief. He wears it well.