It’s the birthday of Virginia Hamilton (1936-2002), whose more than 40 works of “liberation literature” spanned everything from science fiction to folk stories to biography and who was the first black author to win a Newbery Award (1975) and the first children’s author to win a MacArthur “genius” grant (1995).

Hamilton was born in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and raised on the farm that her family had had since the 1850s. Her grandfather, Levi Perry, had been born a slave in Virginia but was brought to Ohio as an infant via the Underground Railroad. Hamilton grew up hearing stories of this and was even named to commemorate the event. As a child, she read a ton, won awards in summer reading programs, and especially loved Nancy Drew. Hamilton studied at Antioch College and at The Ohio State University (go Bucks, blah blah blah), but didn’t have the money to graduate. (OSU later gave her an honorary doctorate.) Instead, she moved to New York and studied writing at the New School for Social Research while supporting herself as a receptionist, nightclub singer, and cost accountant. (I’m going to look at our CPA differently this year. You just never know.)

While in New York, Hamilton met the poet Arnold Adoff and married him in 1960. Hamilton worked at her writing and had two children. At a time when most books about African Americans were focused on issues of racism and poverty, Hamilton’s first book, Zeely (1967), broke new ground by presenting ordinary characters who happened to be black and were going about their ordinary lives. Her next book, The House of Dies Drear (1968), about an abolitionist, won the Edgar Allen Poe Award for Best Juvenile Mystery. She wrote several more books—in the meantime moving with her family back to Yellow Springs and building a house on the remaining acres of the family farm—and in 1974 published M.C. Higgins, The Great, which became the first ever book to win the National Book Award (Children’s Books), Newbery Medal, and the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award; this is considered a grand slam, like winning the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, and the Belmont, only with books instead of horses, and probably less gambling.

Hamilton won a ton of other awards as well (though never, sadly, the Kentucky Derby), and in 1992 won the Hans Christian Andersen Award for Writing, international children’s lit’s greatest honor, becoming only the fourth American to do so. Just a ton of awards: big buttery handfuls. Really. Go to her website here.

Have a fine and pleasant Tuesday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.