Making The Right Choices

“I believe without a single shadow of a doubt that it is necessary for young people to learn to make choices. Learning to make right choices is the only way they will survive in an increasingly frightening world.” – Lois Lowry

Born in Hawaii on this date in 1937, Lowry is known for expressing realistic life experiences in her books for young readers, which include her award-winning Quartet The Giver, Gathering Blue, Messenger and Son, and the Anastasia Krupnik series. 

The daughter of an Army officer, Lowry grew up “around the globe,” graduating from high school in New York and then attending Brown University in Rhode Island before getting married and raising a family.  Always interested in writing, she resumed that love as her children got older, combining writing with finishing her college education in Maine, where she also studied photography. 

                                                       Her first book, A Summer to Die, came out when she was 40, establishing her as a writer that young people wanted to read.  Two years later, Lowry cemented that position with the launch of her popular humorous series of novels featuring Anastasia Krupnik.  Lowry is the winner of two Newbery Awards – one for The Giver and another for her World War II historical novel Number The Stars. 

“What comes to me always is a character, a scene, a moment. That's going to be the beginning. Then, as I write, I begin to perceive an ending. I begin to see a destination, although sometimes that changes. And then, of course, there's the whole middle section looming.”

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