Nancy Willard was born June 26, 1936, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the daughter of Hobart Hurd Willard, a famed university chemistry professor and researcher, and Marge Sheppard Willard. An author of poetry, juvenile literature, criticism, short stories, and a novel, Willard has said that she grew up in a lively home that was a little like William Blake's Inn.

Willard started writing at an early age.

She and her sister Ann put out a precocious two-person newspaper, the "Stony Lake News," at the family's summer retreat in rural Michigan. Her first published poem appeared when she was seven, and her miniature book "A Child's Star" was reproduced in Horn Book magazine while she was still in high school.

Willard attended the University of Michigan where she received a bachelor's degree in English and a doctorate in medieval literature in 1963. She also holds an advanced degree from...