Our Archival Photo of the Week features award-winning author, Virginia Hamilton performing at a club in New York City in the mid-1950s. Born in 1934, Hamilton grew up among a large extended family in Ohio. She excelled as a student and attended Ohio State University to study literature and creative writing. She later moved to New York City in order to publish her fiction. In between jobs, she took additional writing courses at the New School for Social Research and continued to meet fellow writers, including her husband, poet Arnold Adoff. In 1967, Hamilton published her first novel, Zeely, which was an instant success, winning a Nancy Bloch Award and was recognized as a Notable Children’s Book by the American Library Association. The next year, she published The House of Dies Drear (1968), a mystery that won the Edgar Allan Poe Award. By 1969, Hamilton, her husband and her two young children moved back to Yellow Springs, Ohio. Hamilton was able to devote more time to writing, and she published a book almost every year. Although Hamilton focused on writing books for young adults and children, she experimented in a wide variety of genres. Other notable books include The Planet of Junior Brown (1971), M.C. Higgins, the Great (1974), Cousins (1990), and Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush (1982). In 2002, Hamilton passed away after a long battle with breast cancer.