Jane Yolen

Jane Hyatt Yolen was born on February 11, 1939, in New York City, the first child of Isabel Berlin Yolen, a psychiatric social worker, and Will Hyatt Yolen, a journalist. Growing up in a household where storytelling and writing were simply part of the air one breathed, she later said she assumed all adults were writers — because every adult she knew was. The family moved between California, New York, and Virginia in her early years before settling on Manhattan's Upper West Side after the war. By first grade she had already written her first musical. Yolen earned her Bachelor of Arts from Smith College in 1960, sweeping every poetry prize the school offered and writing the lyrics to the class musical. She went on to earn a Master of Education from the University of Massachusetts in 1976. Her working life began in New York publishing houses — at Gold Medal Books, Routledge, and Alfred A. Knopf Juvenile Books — writing in every spare hour. On her 22nd birthday, February 11, 1961, her first book, Pirates in Petticoats, was published. She never stopped. Over the next six decades, Yolen authored or edited more than 450 books spanning fantasy, science fiction, children's literature, historical fiction, and poetry. She was particularly celebrated for Owl Moon, which won the 1987 Caldecott Medal, and The Devil's Arithmetic, a landmark work of Holocaust literature for young readers. Newsweek dubbed her "America's Hans Christian Andersen." She won two Nebula Awards, two World Fantasy Awards, the SFWA Damon Knight Grand Master Award, and served as President of Science Fiction Writers of America from 1986 to 1988. In 2012 she became the first woman to deliver the Andrew Lang lecture. In 1962, she married David W. Stemple, an ornithologist and computer scientist who inspired her lifelong love of birding and co-authored several books with her. Together they raised three children — Heidi, Adam, and Jason — and six grandchildren. After David's death from cancer in 2006, she found renewed companionship with her college sweetheart, Peter Tacy. She divided her final years between Hatfield, Massachusetts — living next door to her daughter Heidi — and a beloved home in Scotland. Jane Yolen died peacefully at her home in Hatfield on June 11, 2026, at age 87, with her daughter reading Owl Moon aloud and her son Adam's music filling the room. Her final act was the same as her first: surrounded by story.