And sure enough, comet-like, the corners of East Coast, silk-stocking publishing were suddenly illuminated by her work: The New Yorker will run 15 poems, the New York Review of Books ran one, and the New York Times published a short profile and a poem from her new Random House collection, “Ants on the Melon.” B.“She has arrived in our world like a comet,” said poet Galway Kinnell after seeing Virginia Hamilton Adair’s work for the first time, a quote that has since appeared in several places, not least in poetry editor Alice Quinn’s profile of Adair for the Dec. Paul Robeson: The Life and Times of a Free Black Man (1974).Time-Ago Lost: More Tales of Jahdu (1973).The House of Dies Drear (1968) (Part One - Dies Drear).Hamilton passed away from breast cancer on Februin Dayton, Ohio. In 1997, a film based on her novel The Planet of Junior Brown, was adapted and directed by Clement Virgo. In 2010, the American Library Association established the Coretta Scott King-Virginia Hamilton Award, and the Virginia Hamilton Conference on Multicultural Literature for Youth has been held annually at Kent State University since 1984. She won the Hans Christian Andersen Award for Writing, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, Edgar Allan Poe Award, the Coretta Scott King Award, the Catholic Library Association’s Regina Medal, and Southern Mississippi’s de Grummond Medal. Throughout her career, she was a celebrated and popular children’s author. The book also won the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, National Book Award, New York Times Outstanding Children’s Book of the Year, and Boston Globe’s Horn Book Award. Higgins, the Great, which went on to win the Newbery Medal Award, making Hamilton the first Black female writer to win the award.

In 1971, her book The Planet of Junior Brown earned a Newbery Honor Book medal and the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award. Her first book, Zeely, was published in 1967 in total, she published more than 40 children's books.

Her husband supported his family and wife’s writing by working as a teacher. In 1960, Hamilton met and married Arnold Adoff, and the couple eventually moved back to the Hamilton’s family farm in Yellow Springs. Encouraged at a young age to read and write, she earned a full scholarship to Antioch College but decided to attend Ohio State University. (Photo courtesy of Wikipedia and American Library Association)īorn and raised in Yellow Springs, Ohio, Hamilton lived on a farm her family owned since the 1850s.

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