'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' - breathing opportunities to receive thoughts and have time to come out of them before starting again at the left margin” – Virginia Euwer Wolff

Born in Portland, OR on this date in 1937, Euwer Wolff is author of the award-winning series Make Lemonade, featuring a 14-year-old girl named LaVaughn who babysits for the children of a 17-year-old single mother.  True Believer, the second in the three-book series (they’re not really a trilogy), won her the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, and in 2011 she was the recipient of the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature, recognizing all of her writing.

 

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

  

Slow and steady is her self-proclaimed writing pace and she says she is “several years in” on a new (as yet untitled) novel whose characters are “brave, foolish and goofy . . . and don’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 rises about noon.  By then, I've put in much of a day's work.”