October 20, 2005

Reproduction of a portrait of Virginia Hamilton, by Leo and Diane Dillon, which will be unveiled at a celebration in Hamilton’s honor on Oct. 29 at the library.

By Diane Chiddister

Next weekend Yellow Springs will celebrate one of its most renowned native daughters, the village she cherished and the library where she learned to love language.

“Virginia Hamilton: A Hometown Celebration” will take place Saturday, Oct. 29, at the Yellow Springs Library. The event is daylong, and at 1 p.m. the library staff will unveil three original works of art that were commissioned in Hamilton’s memory. Present at the event will be Hamilton’s husband, Arnold Adoff, and the couple’s children, Leigh and Jaime Adoff.

One of America’s most beloved and respected writers of literature for children and young adults, Hamilton wrote more than 40 novels and collections of stories, and she received almost every award possible in her field before she died in 2002, including the Hans Christian Anderson award, which is considered “the Nobel prize” for writers of children’s literature, according to Arnold Adoff.

Hamilton was known for introducing complexity and depth into children’s literature, and also for writing about the richness of African-American lives in a way that hadn’t been done before, Don Wallis wrote in a News article after she died.

Ann Cooper, the children’s librarian at the Yellow Springs Library who is organizing the event, described Hamilton’s work as “groundbreaking.”

“The voices she was using weren’t used before,” she said.

Hamilton, whose family had lived in the village for generations, moved to New York as young woman to pursue her writing career, but then returned to her hometown with Adoff to raise their children, and lived here until her death.

In honoring her, Adoff said, he wanted also to honor the town that helped shape her.

“What she got from Yellow Springs was a nurturing, a love, the strength of a small town and an understanding of America,” Adoff said. “She was truly a small-town girl made good.”

It is also appropriate to honor the library itself, Adoff said. When Hamilton was a young girl growing up during the Depression, resources were scarce, he said, but she could discover new worlds through books at the library. The Yellow Springs Library also sponsored the contest in which Hamilton, at a young age, won her first prize as a writer, and she always fondly remembered the collection of fairy tales she won, he said.

Next Saturday’s event grew from Adoff’s contacting library employees and asking them to draw up a wish list of things they would like for the library in Hamilton’s memory, Cooper said. Library staff listed a “readers couch,” a portrait of Hamilton, and a handmade hooked rug for storytime, and expected him to choose one. Instead, Cooper said, he chose them all.

On Saturday, the staff will unveil the creations commissioned in Hamilton’s honor. They are a large portrait of Hamilton, painted by Leo and Diane Dillon, who illustrated many of Hamilton’s books; a couch designed and made by local carpenter Alan Greenberg and fiber artist and weaver Julia Cady; and an area rug, showing scenes from Hamilton’s life and stories, handhooked by Springfield artists Georgia Glass and Toby Baker.

The library also received support from the Yellow Springs Community Foundation and the Yellow Springs Library Association.

The celebration will kick off the morning of Oct. 29 with a workshop for young writers in grades five through eight, facilitated by Jaime Adoff, a writer of children’s books, and McKinney School teacher Aurelia Blake. Preregistration is required.

The library will also announce a youth art show and will distribute a call for submissions. The library will purchase one or more items to add to its collection and will have an exhibit of submitted work at a later time.

It is appropriate that the Oct. 29 event should focus on young people, said Adoff, himself a poet, since Hamilton spent her life writing for them. And it’s important that Yellow Springs be acknowledged for what it gave to a little girl who grew up to become one of the world’s most renowned writers, he said.

“It really is a hometown celebration,” he said. “It’s a celebration of Yellow Springs at its best, of what Yellow Springs can produce.”

Contact: dchiddister@ysnews.com