Virginia Hamilton

Born in 1936, Virginia Hamilton grew up on a truck farm in Yellow Springs, Ohio, one of five children. Her maternal grandfather, an escaped slave, was the one who first brought the family to Yellow Springs.

She graduated from Antioch College where she majored in writing. She also attended Ohio State University and the New School for Social Research.

She married fellow children's book writer, Arnold Adoff and the two of them built a home on the family land in Yellow Springs. At the encouragement of one of her professors, she began writing stories. Her first published novel was a children's book. From there she spent three decades writing children's stories, picture books, folk tales, and biographies.

She has won such awards as the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal, a Newbery Medal, an Edgar Allen Poe Award, Hans Christian Anderson Award, three Coretta Scott King Medals, and a Boston Globe/Horn Book Award. She was the first African American to win the Newbery. She was also the first and only author of children's literature to receive a MacArthur Fellowship.

Hamilton died in 2002.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

--B. Redman