Virginia Esther Hamilton was born on March 12, 1936, in Yellow Springs, Ohio. She was the last of five children, and she says that her parents and siblings pampered her. Hamilton's father, Kenneth, was a musician, and Virginia grew up with a love of music, singing solos in an African Methodist Episcopal church choir by the time she was six.

She always enjoyed school and graduated from high school with honors. She then studied, on a full scholarship, creative writing and literature at her hometown college, Antioch, from 1952 to 1955. She left Antioch for Ohio State University and later studied at the New School for Social Research in New York City.

Hamilton married Arnold Adoff, a poet, in 1960, and they have two children, a boy and a girl. The family has returned to Yellow Springs after ten years in New York, and they live with many pets...