Virginia Euwer Wolff (born August 25, 1937) is an American author of children's literature. [1] [2] Her award-winning series Make Lemonade features a 14-year-old girl named LaVaughn, who babysits for the children of a 17-year-old single mother. There are three books. The second, True Believer , won the 2001 National Book Award for Young People's Literature. [3] The second and third, This Full House (2009), garnered Kirkus Reviews starred reviews. [a] She was the recipient of the 2011 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature, honoring her entire body of work. [4]
Virginia Euwer Wolff was born in Portland, Oregon in 1937. She grew up in a log house with no electricity, on an apple and pear orchard. [5] In 1945, she began violin lessons, which fomented her love of music. [6] She attended the girls' school St. Helen's Hall (now Oregon Episcopal School) and Smith College. She married Arthur Richard Wolff in 1959. They divorced in 1976.
In 2003, St. Helen's Hall honored Wolff with a Distinguished Alumna Award. She has lived in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C., but now reads, writes, and plays chamber music in Oregon. [7]
Karen S. Hesse is an American author of children's literature and literature for young adults, often with historical settings. She received the Newbery Medal for Out of the Dust (1997).
Katherine Womeldorf Paterson is an American writer best known for children's novels, including Bridge to Terabithia. For four different books published 1975–1980, she won two Newbery Medals and two National Book Awards. She is one of four people to win the two major international awards; for "lasting contribution to children's literature" she won the biennial Hans Christian Andersen Award for Writing in 1998 and for her career contribution to "children's and young adult literature in the broadest sense" she won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award from the Swedish Arts Council in 2006, the biggest monetary prize in children's literature. Also for her body of work she was awarded the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature in 2007 and the Children's Literature Legacy Award from the American Library Association in 2013. She was the second US National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, serving 2010 and 2011.
Naomi Shihab Nye is an Arab American poet, editor, songwriter, and novelist. Born to a Palestinian father and an American mother, she began composing her first poetry at the age of six. In total, she has published or contributed to over 30 volumes of poetry. Her works include poetry, young-adult fiction, picture books, and novels. Nye received the 2013 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature in honor of her entire body of work as a writer, and in 2019 the Poetry Foundation designated her the Young People's Poet Laureate for the 2019–21 term.
Meshack Asare is a popular African children's author. He was born in Ghana and currently resides in Degenfeld, Germany. On 15 July 2014, he was announced as a finalist for the prestigious international award, the 2015 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature, which he won on 24 October 2014, becoming the first African to receive the award. The Brassman's Secret was his representative text read by the nominating jury, and the award honors his entire body of work.
Kirkus Reviews is an American book review magazine founded in 1933 by Virginia Kirkus. The magazine's publisher, Kirkus Media, is headquartered in New York City. Kirkus Reviews confers the annual Kirkus Prize to authors of fiction, nonfiction, and young readers' literature.
Cynthia Leitich Smith is a New York Times best-selling author of fiction for children and young adults.
World Literature Today (WLT) is an American magazine of international literature and culture, published at the University of Oklahoma. The magazine's stated goal is to publish international essays, poetry, fiction, interviews, and book reviews for a non-academic audience. It was founded under the name Books Abroad in 1927 by Roy Temple House, a professor at the University of Oklahoma. In January 1977, the journal assumed its present name, World Literature Today.
Ellen Wittlinger was an American author of young adults novels, including the Michael L. Printz Honor book Hard Love.
Marilyn Singer is an author of children's books in a wide variety of genres, including fiction and non-fiction picture books, juvenile novels and mysteries, young adult fantasies, and poetry. Some of her poems are written as reverso poems.
Vera Baker Williams was an American children's writer and illustrator. Her best known work, A Chair for My Mother, has won multiple awards and was featured on the children's television show Reading Rainbow.
Padma Tiruponithura Venkatraman, also known as T. V. Padma, is an Indian-American author and scientist.
Marilyn Nelson is an American poet, translator, biographer, and children's book author. She is a professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut, and the former Poet Laureate of Connecticut. She is a winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature, and the Frost Medal. From 1978 to 1994, she published under the name Marilyn Nelson Waniek. She is the author or translator of more than twenty books and five chapbooks of poetry for adults and children. While most of her work deals with historical subjects, in 2014 she published a memoir, named one of NPR's Best Books of 2014, entitled How I Discovered Poetry.
Margarita Engle is a Cuban American poet and author of many award-winning books for children, young adults and adults. Most of Engle's stories are written in verse and are a reflection of her Cuban heritage and her deep appreciation and knowledge of nature. She became the first Latino awarded a Newbery Honor in 2009 for The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba's Struggle for Freedom. She was selected by the Poetry Foundation to serve from 2017 to 2019 as the sixth Young People's Poet Laureate. On October 9, 2018, Margarita Engle was announced the winner of the 2019 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature. She was nominated by 2019 NSK Prize jury member Lilliam Rivera. Her 2024 book, Wild Dreamers, was longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature.
True Believer is a verse novel for young adults, written by Virginia Euwer Wolff and published by Atheneum Books in 2001. It has been published as an audiobook read by Heather Alicia Simms, and translated into Chinese, German, Italian, and Japanese. It won the U.S. National Book Award for Young People's Literature and was named a Michael L. Printz Honor book.
Thanhha Lai is a Vietnamese-American writer of children's literature. She won the 2011 National Book Award for Young People's Literature and a Newbery Honor for her debut novel, Inside Out & Back Again, which was published by HarperCollins.
Mildred DeLois Taylor is a Newbery Award-winning American young adult novelist. She is best known for her novel Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, part of her Logan family series.
Make Lemonade is a verse novel for young adults, written by Virginia Euwer Wolff and originally published in 1993 by Henry Holt and Company. It is the first book in a trilogy series consisting of Make Lemonade, True Believer, and This Full House. These novels are characterized by their free verse style. The trilogy is unified by its protagonist LaVaughn, a fourteen-year-old girl who recounts her experiences and perspective from first-person point of view. All three books have been published as audiobooks read by Heather Alicia Simms.
Elizabeth Acevedo is an American poet and author. In September 2022, the Poetry Foundation named her the year's Young People's Poet Laureate.
Hearts Unbroken is a young adult romance novel written by Cynthia Leitich Smith, published October 9, 2018 by Candlewick Press.
Ghost is a young adult novel by Jason Reynolds, published August 30, 2016 by Atheneum Books. It is the first book of Reynold's Track series, followed by Patina (2017), Sunny (2018), and Lu (2018).
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