Virginia Hamilton was the first Black writer to win the Newbery Medal in recognition of M.C. Higgins, the Great, a novel published in 1974. Considered challenging, literary and thematically complex, Hamilton's oeuvre is often credited by critics with having raised the standards of American literature for younger readers.

"What personal self I have is in my books. Everything that might become neurotic or personally problematic I put into a narrative. My stories are little pieces of me."¹

"Most of my writing is flavored from my childhood experience; although I write about the rural present, there is much of the Depression thirties in everything I create. So when I write about the road, as I'm doing in a new book, I see what somebody might have seen when she traveled the road a long time ago. I see the empty spaces and billboards; I don't see the motels. I...