Sharon Creech

Sharon Creech was born on July 29, 1945, in South Euclid, Ohio, the middle of five children in a large, storytelling family whose warmth would color her fiction throughout her career. She attended Hiram College in Ohio and George Mason University, and spent nearly twenty years living and teaching in England and Switzerland, experiences that gave her work an international perspective and a sensitivity to the experience of being an outsider in an unfamiliar place. She began writing fiction for young readers while teaching in England, and her debut novel launched one of the most consistently acclaimed careers in contemporary children’s literature.

Creech’s breakthrough novel, Walk Two Moons (1994), won the Newbery Medal and introduced the world to her signature narrative style — layered storytelling, lyrical prose, and an emotional depth that takes young readers seriously as thinkers and feelers. The novel follows thirteen-year-old Salamanca Tree Hiddle as she travels with her grandparents across the country, telling them the story of her friend Phoebe while slowly revealing the truth about her own missing mother. The book’s interweaving narratives and its unflinching engagement with grief and loss marked Creech as a distinctive literary voice, and the Newbery Medal confirmed what readers and teachers already knew.

Creech followed Walk Two Moons with a succession of celebrated novels, including Chasing Redbird, The Wanderer (a Newbery Honor book), Ruby Holler, which won the Carnegie Medal in the United Kingdom, and Love That Dog, a verse novel about a boy’s discovery of poetry that became a beloved classroom staple. Each book bears the hallmarks of Creech’s approach: a strong sense of place, richly drawn family relationships, a voice that is both distinctly childlike and surprisingly wise, and an emotional honesty that trusts young readers to handle complex feelings and ambiguous situations.

Creech’s writing is celebrated for the warmth and humor she brings even to difficult subjects, and for her ability to write about grief, loss, and displacement without sentimentality or false comfort. Her books consistently find ways to affirm the importance of stories themselves — of the narratives we tell to make sense of our lives. She returned to the United States after her years abroad and lives in Maine and Florida. Sharon Creech is one of the most decorated and beloved authors in contemporary children’s literature, her work a testament to the power of honest, carefully crafted storytelling.