To highlight The Ohio State University’s children’s literature program, the College of Education and Human Ecology (EHE) will present the inaugural Excellence in Children’s Literature: Newbery Award Symposium this fall. The symposium will be held Nov. 15 from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Ohio Union.
The symposium will spotlight five Black authors who have won the prestigious John Newbery Award, considered the top prize for children’s literature in the United States. The event will feature a panel discussion with the honorees, keynote presentations by authors and breakout sessions on a variety of topics related to literacy and education.
A special emphasis of the symposium will be EHE’s long history with African American children’s literature. The first Black author to receive the Newbery Medal attended Ohio State: the late Virginia Hamilton.
Hamilton’s deep Buckeye roots
Hamilton was born to a large extended family in Yellow Springs in 1934. She transferred to Ohio State from Antioch College in 1956, majoring in literature and creative writing.
Hamilton went on to publish 41 books, including “M.C. Higgins, the Great,” for which she won the 1975 Newbery Medal. She received numerous other honors throughout her career, including the Coretta Scott King Book Award, the Edgar Allan Poe Award and the Hans Christian Andersen Award, according to the American Library Association.
Though she gained international acclaim and lived in New York City for several years, she stayed close to her Ohio roots, said her son Jaime Adoff.
“Her mother’s house is right up the field from our house [in Yellow Springs] that we grew up in,” said Adoff, who is also an author and a musician. “When my mom left for New York, she said, ‘Save me this last little piece of land.’”
Hamilton moved to New York in 1958 to break into publishing. It was in the Big Apple that she met and married poet Arnold Adoff. Jaime Adoff was 2 years old when his parents decided to return to Hamilton’s hometown.
“Having all the family around and raising a family there was just great,” he said. “And it wasn’t bad that it was an absolutely perfect place to write. I mean, quiet, there’s space. Nobody bothers you.”
Adoff said his parents’ work ethic inspired him and his sister Leigh, an opera singer.
“The creativity was just everywhere,” he said. “My mom went into her office. … She would go in early in the morning with a cup of coffee and come out hours later with pages of writing, and I thought she poured coffee on paper and got magic. So it was literally magic to me when I was really young.”
Like mother, like son
Adoff’s original creative path led him to a music career. His mother was also musically gifted, having worked as a nightclub singer in New York before her literary career took off. Adoff graduated from Central State University with a bachelor’s degree in music, with an emphasis on percussion. Like his mother, he moved to New York to pursue career opportunities.
After fronting his own rock band and releasing several albums throughout the 1990s, Adoff returned to Yellow Springs and followed in his mother’s footsteps once more. He decided to try his hand at fiction writing and sought his mother’s advice.
“I said, ‘Hey, Mom, guess what? I'm joining the family business,’” he said. “I posed the question, ‘So what is the key to this? What is the key to being this incredible writer or to putting all this together?’ And I thought she was going to come down high from the mountains, but she was the type of person who wanted you to figure it out. She knew that it was different for every person. Basically, she just said, ‘Jaime, you have to dig deep.’”
Hamilton’s literary legacy continues
Adoff has penned several critically acclaimed young adult novels, including Jimi & Me (2005), which received the 2006 Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe New Talent Author Award. His forthcoming book, Violet and the Frost King is a collaboration with his mother.
The book originated as an unpublished manuscript that Adoff discovered after his parents’ deaths. Hamilton died in 2002, and after Arnold Adoff died in 2023, Adoff and his sister discovered a trove of their mother’s unfinished works in the family home.
Violet and the Frost King and Jaime Adoff’s picture book, Rock N Roll Dad, will be published by Christy Ottaviano Books/Little Brown in 2026.
“It was the first time I ever – even though posthumously – collaborated with my mother. … What do you do when somebody gives you a Picasso?” he said. “It’s an absolutely beautiful book.”
Adoff said his mother’s legacy endures because her books explore universal themes.
“Her characters, they did happen to be African American, and she wanted them to be, and she wanted to tell their stories, but her stories transcended all that,” he said. “They were everyone’s story.”
For registration and more information about Excellence in Children’s Literature: Newbery Award Symposium, visit the event’s website.
