The Virginia Hamilton Literary Award was established in 1998 by the Advisory Board of Kent State University's Virginia Hamilton Conference. The award recognizes an American author or illustrator whose work demonstrates artistic excellence, makes a significant contribution to the field of multicultural literature for children and adolescents, and serves as a model for other artists in the field.

 Patricia C. McKissack, author of more than one hundred books for young people, has been selected to receive the third annual Virginia Hamilton Literary Award. The award honors  Patricia McKissack for having changed the face of children's literature with her deep, rich, and poignant expressions of African American people, both real and imaginary. McKissack has received a Newbery Honor and numerous Coretta Scott King Awards for her fiction, biography, and nonfiction including The Dark-Thirty: Southern Tales of the Supernatural; Black Hands, White Sails: The Story of African American Whalers; Christmas in the Big House, Christmas in the Quarters; and Sojourner Truth: Ain't I a Woman?. Many of her works have been selected as notable books of the year by the American Library Association, and she has received the Orbis Pictus Award for Nonfiction for Christmas in the Big House, Christmas in the Quarters, the Boston Globe/ Horn Book Award and the NAACP Image Award for Sojourner Truth.  She has collaborated with her husband, Fredrick L. McKissack on many of her books and recently she has written with her son, Fredrick L. McKissack, Jr. Black Diamond: The Story of the Negro Baseball Leagues and Black Hoops: The History of African Americans in Basketball.

McKissack began writing in 1975 when, as a parent and a teacher, she realized that there were so few images of African Americans in literature for young people. Since then she has explored the important everyday lives of well known and not so well known people, often as seen through the eyes of African American children. Important themes in her work deal with survival in the face of injustice, discrimination, and segregation, and an appreciation of the wonderful music and rhythms of ancient African oral tales. Her work has touched on every type of literature including historical fiction, biography, traditional stories, and an impressive array of fascinating nonfiction. In addition to maintaining a prolific writing career she, along with her husband, is a very active public speaker known as an engaging speaker who is known for her passion for spreading the word about the diversity of African American culture, and serving as an inspiration and model for future writers. A former teacher and editor, McKissack credits her love of books and language to the oral storytellers in her family and the many hours she spent as a child in the Nashville Public Library, one of the few places in her hometown that wasn't segregated. About writing she has said, "I write because there's a need to have books for, by, and about the African American experience and how we helped to develop this country."

Ms. McKissack will receive the award on April 6, 2001 at the 17th annual Virginia Hamilton Conference at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio.

The Virginia Hamilton Literary Award is sponsored by the Akron-Summit County Public Library, Cuyahoga County Public Library, Hamilton Arts, Inc., NOLA Regional Library System, and the Victor C. Laughlin, M.D. Memorial Foundation Trust.

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