Kimberly Willis Holt writes poignant coming-of-age fiction for young readers, books that hum with the sleepy rhythms of small-town life in her native South and the cadences of its vernacular. Since her 1998 debut novel, My Louisiana Sky, Holt has won a number of awards, including two American Library Association citations for that particular work, and a prestigious National Book Award for Young People's Literature for her third, 1999's When Zachary Beaver Came to Town. But all of her titles have garnered enthusiastic praise from critics of young-adult fiction for their realistic portrayals of life in the rural South, and for the iconoclastic, but sympathetic characters she creates to lead her stories.

Holt was born in 1960, in Pensacola, Florida, the site of a large U.S. Navy base. Her father worked for many years as a chef for the U.S. Navy, and her mother was a teacher. Julian...