Short Stuffy Bio
(It's not that stuffy. Here is the Official Information Page in three versions. The school-visit-version is at the "Life Notice" link, above.)
Deborah Wiles was born in Alabama into an Air Force family and spent her growing-up summers in a small Mississippi town with an extended family full of Southern characters. Today she writes about them and they live on in her stories.
Deborah is the first children's book author to be named Writer-in-Residence at Thurber House, James Thurber's boyhood home in Columbus, Ohio. She received the Ezra Jack Keats New Writer Award from the New York Public Library and the Keats Foundation in 2002 and is the 2004 recipient of the PEN/Phyllis Reynolds Naylor Working Writer Fellowship. She holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College and taught "Writing Techniques for Teachers" at Towson University in Maryland until she moved to Atlanta in 2004. She also taught writing in the MFA program at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts and at Vermont College.
Deborah has written two picture books: One Wide Sky (Harcourt, 2003), a Children’s Book of the Month Club selection, and Freedom Summer (Simon & Schuster, 2001), winner of numerous awards including dual Ezra Jack Keats Awards and the Coretta Scott King/Steptoe award for illustrator Jerome Lagarrigue. A picture book about Robert Kennedy is forthcoming from Scholastic.
Deborah has written three novels about growing up in the south. They are known as the Aurora County trilogy: Love, Ruby Lavender was an ALA Notable Children's Book, a Children's Book Sense 76 Pick, and a New York Public Library Book for Reading and Sharing. The book has also been nominated for twenty-six state book award reading lists, voted on by children.
Deborah’s novel, Each Little Bird That Sings won the Bank Street Fiction Award for 2005, a Golden Kite Honor Award, was a 2005 E.B. White Read Aloud Award winner and is a 2005 National Book Award finalist. The Aurora County All-Stars completes the Aurora County trilogy.
Deborah's newest project is called "The Sixties Trilogy: Three novels of the 1960s for young readers." Book one, Fallout, will be published in 2010 by Scholastic.
Deborah lives in Atlanta, Georgia where she avoids the traffic, writes songs with her husband, jazz pianist Jim Pearce, climbs Stone Mountain, and grows the world's most beautiful zinnias.
2.
Deborah Wiles turned her attentions to children's books as she fell in love with them while reading to her children. She sold her first picture book, Freedom Summer (Simon & Schuster/Atheneum 2001) in 1998 followed that same year by her first novel, Love, Ruby Lavender (Harcourt 2001). Deborah's work has received the Ezra Jack Keats New Writer Award, the PEN/Phyllis Reynolds Naylor Working Writer Fellowship, and a Golden Kite Honor from SCBWI. Hew novel Each Little Bird That Sings was been awarded the E.B. White Read Aloud Award and is a 2005 National Book Award finalist. Deborah lives in Atlanta, Georgia. In 2010, she will publish the first of a trilogy of novels about the 1960s for young readers.
3.
Deborah Wiles is the author of two picture books: One Wide Sky (Harcourt) and Freedom Summer (Simon & Schuster), and three novels: Love, Ruby Lavender, Each Little Bird That Sings (a National Book Award Finalist), and The Aurora County All-Stars (all Harcourt). Next year, with Scholastic, she will publish Fallout, book one of "The Sixties Trilogy: Three novels of the 1960s for young readers." She taught "Writing Techniques for Teachers" at Towson University and has taught in the MFA in Writing programs at Lesley University and Vermont College. She has taught personal narrative writing for many years, to children and adults. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.