Hesse, Karen. In Something About the Author. Volume 74. Detroit: Gale Research, 1994, pp. 120-121. Short entry with some biographical and publication data, and a "sidelight" from Hesse explaining some of the early influences on her writing.

Hesse, Karen. Something About the Author: Juvenile Writers Autobiography Series. Volume 25. Detroit: Gale Research, 1998, pp. 117-138. Hesse writes warmly and intimately about growing up in Baltimore, attending college, working, marrying and having children, and writing books.

Horn Book 169 (1998). The reviewer says of Out of the Dust, "In first-person free-verse poems fourteenyear- old Billie Jo Kelby relates her Depression-era experiences in the Oklahoma panhandle. Billie Jo's aborted escape from the dust bowl almost gets lost in a procession of bleak events, instead of serving as the book's climax. Yet her voice, nearly every word informed by longing, provides an immediacy that expressively depicts both a grim historical era and one family's...