We’re so excited that another award-winning author has joined The Booking Biz family. Vaunda Micheaux Nelson is the author of a number of non-fiction books, including the 2010 Coretta Scott King winner BAD NEWS FOR OUTLAWS: THE REMARKABLE LIFE OF BASS REEVES, DEPUTY U.S. MARSHAL and 2012 Boston Globe-Horn Book Award winner NO CRYSTAL STAIR: A DOCUMENTARY NOVEL OF THE LIFE AND WORK OF LEWIS MICHEAUX, HARLEM BOOKSELLER.
If you’re wondering whether there’s a connection between Vaunda and the subject of that Boston Globe-Horn Book Award winner, you’d be right. Lewis Micheaux is Vaunda’s great uncle. She used interviews; articles from magazines, newspapers and even church publications; books; and FBI files that had been compiled about Lewis Micheaux’s political activities to write this young adult biography about the owner of the National Memorial African Bookstore.
A few years later, Vaunda wrote about her great uncle again, for the picture book THE BOOK ITCH: FREEDOM, TRUTH & HARLEM’S GREATEST BOOKSTORE. Told from the viewpoint of Lewis’ son, Lewis Micheaux Jr., THE BOOK ITCH won the 2016 Coretta Scott King Award for illustrator R. Gregory Christie, a 2016 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award and a 2016 Jane Addams Children’s Book Honor.
And her works feature a number of non-relative subjects too.
As well as a writer, Vaunda has been a teacher, a newspaper reporter, a bookseller, a recreation specialist, a children’s librarian, and has served on Newbery and Caldecott Awards committees. She holds master’s degrees from The Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College, Vermont, and from the University of Pittsburgh School of Library and Information Science.
Books have long been part of Vaunda’s family. She credits her love of books to her late parents, who read to her faithfully every night. Through her own books, she hopes to give young people some of what her parents gave her—opportunities to grow through story.