Virginia Hamilton is easily the most distinguished literary voice writing for young readers today. Since the publication of her first novel, "Zeely, " she has won every major award given to authors. Her many, many citations include the international Hans Christian Andersen Medal and the 1995 Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal, both given for her outstanding body of work. Besides receiving the National Book Award, the John Newbery Medal, and the "Boston Globe/Horn Book" Award, all for "M.C. Higgins, the Great, " she's won two additional "Boston Globe/Horn Book" Awards, three "Boston Globe/Horn Book" Honors, three Newbery Honors, three Coretta Scott King Awards, five Coretta Scott King Honors, the Edgar Allan Poe Award, the Regina Medal, the NAACP Image Award, and countless others. In 1984 the Virginia Hamilton Lecture in Children's Literature annual conference was established in her name at Kent State University, and in 1995 she became the first and only children's author to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.Like M.C., Ms. Hamilton was born in the town an ancestor (her grandfather, Levi Perry) escaped to from slavery. She still lives in that town, Yellow Springs, Ohio, with her husband, poet Arnold Adoff.