The Open Road Blog

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, ...

Today we’ve selected children’s book author Virginia Hamilton (1934-2002) for our Archival Photo of the Week. The photo shows Hamilton as a seventh grader in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where she was born and raised.

Hamilton was one of the most celebrated African-American writers of the twentieth century. Over the course of three decades she won nearly every major award for children and YA literature: the National Book Award, the John Newbery Medal, the Edgar Allan Poe Award, the Coretta Scott King Award, the Boston Globe/Horn Book Award, and the Hans Christian Andersen Medal. Hamilton wrote mainly about African-American history and folklore, ...

It is with great pleasure that we share this week's featured except from Mama Ruby. In Mama Ruby, New York Times bestselling author Mary Monroe presents an unforgettable tale featuring Mama Ruby, the indomitable heroine of her acclaimed novel The Upper Room. Now readers will get a peek into Ruby’s early years, as she transforms from a spoiled small-town girl into one of the South’s most notorious and volatile women. Click here for the previous Excerpt of the Week from Ira Levin's This Perfect Day.

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Chapter One

Shreveport, Louisiana, 1934

Nobody ever had to ...

A prolific teller of African American tales recalls getting her inspiration from a children’s librarian bearing books of many sizes and hues. 

As part of Open Road's ongoing National Library Week celebration, we're proud to share "Sentinels in Long Still Rows" with readers. This essay by Virginia Hamilton originally appeared in the June/July 1999 issue of American Libraries and is provided below courtesy of Arnold Adoff. 

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My mother, Etta Belle Hamilton, was a perfectly round, small woman, not five feet tall. As a youngster going on 12, I soon was as tall as she. But ...