'Excelling at a slow, steady award-winning pace'

“Reviewers have called my books'novels in verse.' I think of them as written in prose, but I do use stanzas.Stanza means 'room' in Latin, and I wanted there to be 'room' - breathingopportunities to receive thoughts and have time to come out of them beforestarting again at the left margin” – Virginia Euwer Wolff

Born in Portland, OR on this date in 1937, Euwer Wolff is author of the award-winningseries Make Lemonade, featuring a 14-year-old girl named LaVaughnwho babysits for the children of a 17-year-old single mother.  TrueBeliever, the second in the three-book series (they’re not really atrilogy), won her the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, and in2011 she was the recipient of the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children'sLiterature, recognizing all of her writing.

 

Wolff said she uses her own teenageyears as a foundation for her work.  “The teenage years are the yearsto examine faith - the need to be independent and the need to be anchored,” shesaid. “It’s a time to ask, ‘Who made all this? And what do I have to do withit?’” 

  

Slow and steady is herself-proclaimed writing pace and she says she is “several years in” on a new (asyet untitled) novel whose characters are “brave, foolish and goofy . . . anddon’t know what a Kardashian is.”

 

“No one writes as slowly as I do,I'm convinced.  It's so hard for me . . .I make decisions at a snail's pace,” she said. “I work early in the morning before my nasty critic gets up – he risesabout noon.  By then, I've put in much ofa day's work.”