About Bat 6

About Virginia Euwer Wolff, author of Bat 6

Oregon Reads 2009

Virginia Euwer Wolff’s family came to Oregon from Pennsylvania and New York state in 1911. She graduated from Smith College and has attended graduate schools in New York, Vermont, North Carolina, and Oregon. She has taught school for more than 20 years in New York, Philadelphia, and Oregon.

photo, Virginia Wolff

Among her distinctions are the National Book Award (for True Believer, 2001), two Oregon Book Awards, two Golden Kite awards from the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, the Jane Addams Book Award for Bat 6 and the Jane Addams Honor Citation for True Believer, the International Reading Association Young Adult Book Award and the P.E.N. USA Center West Book Award for Probably Still Nick Swansen, and the Janusz Korczak Award Honor for The Mozart Season.

Make Lemonade (Golden Kite, Oregon Book Award, Book List’s Top of the List) has been translated into nine languages. She was given the Oregon Library Association’s Evelyn Sibley Lampman Award in 2005 for service to the children of Oregon. Her books have all been named ALA Best Books or ALA Notables, sometimes both. True Believer was short listed for England’s Carnegie Medal and was selected as the USA’s honor book for the International Board on Books for Young People in Cape Town, South Africa.

Virginia has played the violin since age 8, with a horrifying lapse of about 15 years in early adulthood; the lapse brought to her attention the notion that every child must have music in order to thrive. She has a grown son (a jazz guitarist in Boston) and daughter (a psychotherapist in Maryland) and two grandchildren, Max and Sarah. She plays chamber music year round.

Other novels by Virginia Euwer Wolff