Jane Yolen

Jane Hyatt Yolen (born February 11, 1939) is an American writer of fantasy, science fiction, and children's books. She is the author or editor of more than 280 books, of which the best known is The Devil's Arithmetic, a Holocaust novella. Her other works include the Nebula Award-winning short story Sister Emily's Lightship, the novelette Lost Girls, Owl Moon, The Emperor and the Kite, the Commander Toad series and How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight. She gave the lecture for the 1989 Alice G. Smith Lecture, the inaugural year for the series. This lecture series is held at the University of South Florida School of Information "to honor the memory of its first director, Alice Gullen Smith, known for her work with youth and bibliotherapy." In 2012 she became the first woman to give the Andrew Lang lecture.

Early life

Jane Hyatt Yolen was born February 11, 1939 at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan, the first child of Isabell Berlin Yolen, a psychiatric social worker who became a homemaker upon Yolen's birth, and Will Hyatt Yolen, a journalist who wrote columns at the time for New York newspapers. Isabell also did volunteer work, and wrote short stories in her spare time, but they did not sell. Because the Hyatts, the family of Yolen's grandmother, Mina Hyatt Yolen's, only had girls, a number of the children of Yolen's generation were given their last name as a middle name in order to perpetuate it, including Yolen's brother, Steven Hyatt Yolen, who was born three and a half years later.