Judy Blume is an American writer of children's, young adult (YA) and adult fiction. Some of her best known works are Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. (1970), Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing (1972), Deenie (1973), and Blubber (1974). The New Yorker has called her books "talismans that, for a significant segment of the American female population, marked the passage from childhood to adolescence."
Susan Mary Cooper is an English author of children's books. She is best known for The Dark Is Rising, a contemporary fantasy series set in England and Wales, which incorporates British mythology, such as the Arthurian legends, and Welsh folk heroes. For that work, in 2012 she won the lifetime Margaret A. Edwards Award from the American Library Association, recognizing her contribution to writing for teens. In the 1970s two of the five novels were named the year's best English-language book with an "authentic Welsh background" by the Welsh Books Council.
Children's literature or juvenile literature includes stories, books, magazines, and poems that are made for children. Modern children's literature is classified in two different ways: genre or the intended age of the reader.
Beverly Atlee Cleary is an American writer of children's and young adult fiction. One of America's most successful living authors, 91 million copies of her books have been sold worldwide since her first book was published in 1950. Some of Cleary's best known characters are Ramona Quimby and Beezus Quimby, Henry Huggins and his dog Ribsy, and Ralph S. Mouse.
Joan Delano Aiken was an English writer specialising in supernatural fiction and children's alternative history novels. In 1999 she was awarded an MBE for her services to children's literature. For The Whispering Mountain, published by Jonathan Cape in 1968, she won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a once-in-a-lifetime book award judged by a panel of British children's writers, and she was a commended runner-up for the Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book by a British writer. She won an Edgar Allan Poe Award (1972) for Night Fall.
Joanna Cole, is an American writer of children’s books. She is most famous as the author of The Magic School Bus series. She has written over 250 books ranging from her first book Cockroaches to her famous series Magic School Bus, which is illustrated by Bruce Degen.
Linda Sue Park is a Korean-American author who published her first novel, Seesaw Girl, in 1999. She has written six children's novels and five picture books. Park's work achieved prominence when she received the prestigious 2002 Newbery Medal for her novel A Single Shard. She has written the ninth book in The 39 Clues, Storm Warning, published on May 25, 2010.
Chris Van Allsburg is an American illustrator and writer of children's books. He has won two Caldecott Medals for U.S. picture book illustration, for Jumanji (1981) and The Polar Express (1985), both of which he also wrote; both were later adapted as successful motion pictures. He was also a Caldecott runner-up in 1980 for The Garden of Abdul Gasazi. For his contribution as a children's illustrator he was 1986 U.S. nominee for the biennial, international Hans Christian Andersen Award, the highest international recognition for creators of children's books. He received the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from the University of Michigan in April 2012.
Ann Matthews Martin is an American children's fiction writer, known best for The Baby-Sitters Club series.
Hélène Elizabeth Louise Amélie Paula Dolores Poniatowska, known professionally as Elena Poniatowska is a French-born Mexican journalist and author, specializing in works on social and political issues focused on those considered to be disenfranchised especially women and the poor. She was born in Paris to upper-class parents, including her mother whose family fled Mexico during the Mexican Revolution. She left France for Mexico when she was ten to escape the Second World War. When she was eighteen and without a university education, she began writing for the newspaper Excélsior, doing interviews and society columns. Despite the lack of opportunity for women from the 1950s to the 1970s, she wrote about social and political issues in newspapers, books in both fiction and nonfiction form. Her best known work is La noche de Tlatelolco about the repression of the 1968 student protests in Mexico City. Although she turned down the title of Princess of Poland that she inherited through her father's royal family, and due to her leftwing views, she has been nicknamed "the Red Princess." She is considered to be "Mexico's grande dame of letters" and is still an active writer.
Sharon Creech is an American writer of children's novels. She was the first American winner of the Carnegie Medal for British children's books and the first person to win both the American Newbery Medal and the British Carnegie.
Literary tourism is a type of cultural tourism that deals with places and events from fictional texts as well as the lives of their authors. This could include following the route taken by a fictional character, visiting particular place associated with a novel or a novelist, such as their home, or visiting a poet's grave. Some scholars regard literary tourism as a contemporary type of secular pilgrimage. There are also long-distance walking routes associated with writers, such as the Thomas Hardy Way.
Eleanor Estes was an American children's author and a children's librarian. Her book, Ginger Pye, which she also created illustrations for, won the Newbery Medal. Three of her books were Newbery Honor Winners, and one was awarded the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award. Estes' books were based on her life in small town Connecticut in the early 1900s.
Pam Muñoz Ryan is an American writer for children and young adults, particularly in the multicultural genre. Muñoz Ryan was born in Bakersfield, California and is half Mexican with Basque, Italian, and Oklahoman cultural influences.
Mary Edwards Wertsch is an author, journalist, independent publisher, and expert on the subculture of American military brats. She wrote the book Military Brats: Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress. This book is considered the seminal piece of literature dealing with the effects of growing up as a military brat. In writing the book, Wertsch, a reporter by training, interviewed over 80 military brats and documented the patterns she found in the ways military children are raised, and the ways they continue to be affected, both positively and negatively, well into adulthood.
Marcia Thornton Jones is an American writer of children's books, the author or co-author of more than 135 elementary chapter books, picture books, and mid-grade novels, including The Adventures of the Bailey School Kids series, among other works co-written with Debbie Dadey.
Suzanne Weyn is an American author. She primarily writes children's and young adult science fiction and fantasy novels and has written over fifty novels and short stories. She is best known for The Bar Code Tattoo, The Bar Code Rebellion and The Bar Code Prophecy. The Bar Code Tattoo has been translated into German, and in 2007 was nominated for the Jugendliteraturpreis for youth literature given by the German government. It was a 2007 Nevada Library nominee for Young Adult literature and American Library Association 2005 Quick Pick for Reluctant Young Adult Readers.
Eloise Greenfield is an American children's book and biography author and poet famous for her descriptive, rhythmic style and positive portrayal of the African-American experience.
Maria Guadalupe Harris is the author of the successful children's book series, The Joshua Files. She also worked with the estate of deceased author Gerry Anderson to bring his planned book series Gemini Force One into reality.
Augusta Stevenson (1869–1976) was a writer of children's literature and a teacher. She was born in Indianapolis, Indiana. She wrote over 400 children's books, her most famous being "Childhood of Famous Americans" and "Children's Classics in Dramatic Form."
