Freedom Summer won the Simon Wiesenthal Once Upon A World Award, the Ezra Jack Keats New Writer award for Wiles and New Illustrator award for Jerome Lagarrigue, as well as the Coretta Scott King/Steptoe award for Lagarrigue.Īnother picture book, One Wide Sky, was published in 2003 (Harcourt Brace). Two boys, best friends, want to swim at the town pool together the day it opens to 'everybody under the sun, no matter what color,' but find out that they can't, as the pool has been filled in 'with hot, spongy tar.' The decision they make after this event is one that cements their friendship. The book is based on her memories of her growing up summers in Mississippi and the 1964 passage of the Civil Rights Act. Wiles published a picture book, Freedom Summer (Simon & Schuster/Atheneum), in 2001. She received her MFA in writing from Vermont College in 2003. She has four children and is married to Jim Pearce, a jazz musician. She often says, 'I take my personal narrative and turn it into story.'ĭeborah Wiles was born in Mobile, Alabama, the daughter of Marie Kilgore and Thomas Edwards, who was an air force pilot. Her fiction centers on home, family, kinship, and community, and often deals with historical events (Freedom Summer/Civil Rights, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War), social justice issues, and childhood reactions to those events, as well as everyday childhood moments and mysteries, most taken directly from her childhood. Wiles received the PEN/Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship in 2004 and the E.B. Her documentary novel, Revolution, was a 2014 National Book Award finalist. Her second novel, Each Little Bird That Sings, was a 2005 National Book Award finalist. Deborah Wiles (born May 5, 1953, Mobile, Alabama, United States) is a children's book author.

Anthem by Deborah Wiles