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GU I D E to Y E L L OW S P R I NG S | 2O22 – 2O23 19 been published.” For eight years she was an unpublished writer, making her living by singing in jazz clubs, playing guitar for dance groups and working at more mundane occupations, like accounting. “I was about to give up,” she said. Then, an old friend from Antioch, who had a job with a publisher, managed to get one of her manuscripts before the eyes of her boss. Based on a short story she’d written while at Antioch, it was a novel for children, called “Zeely.” The coming-of-age novel follows a young Black pro - tagonist named Elizabeth who, with her brother John, travels to the farm of an aunt and uncle and spends the summer creating stories and unraveling mysteries. When she meets the book’s name - sake, Zeely Tayber, Eliza - beth is struck by her regal bearing and imagines Zeely is a Watusi queen, inventing an elaborate history for the woman. When Zeely reveals the truths of her personal history to Elizabeth, the young protagonist reconsid- ers the importance of inven- tion in the face of knowing oneself. The book, which inter - weaves themes of racial awareness with Black history and folklore, was published to instant acclaim, with one reviewer accurately prophesy- ing that “no one who reads ‘Zeely’ will ever call its writer unknown again.” That was in 1967. In 1968, Hamilton’s “The House of Dies Drear” — based on a Yellow Springs legend about the Underground Railroad — surpassed the critical success of “Zeely.” Virginia Hamilton’s career was launched. It flourished in Yellow Springs, where Hamilton returned to live, with her husband and two children, Leigh and Jaime, in 1969. In the village, she wrote “M.C. Higgins the Great.” That novel, a bildungsroman set in the Appalachian Mountains, fol - lows the titular teenage pro - tagonist as a mining company intrudes upon his mountain community. Hamilton won the National Book Award for chil - dren’s literature for the novel, also winning the prestigious Newbery Medal; she was the first Black author to do so. The book was adapted into a film in 1986. With the critical acclaim for her work came popular success. Hamilton’s books were and continue to be read in hardcover and paperback by children and adults all over the world. Despite the solid success of the work that established her, a decade into her writing career, Hamilton decided to try something new. Established as a realist who meditated on the lives and identities of Black people, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, she pivoted her focus with the science fiction trilogy of young adult books known as “The Justice Cycle”: “Justice and Her Brothers,” “Dustland” and “The Gathering.” The cycle of novels con - cerns four children in a small Ohio town who, as Hamilton told the News, “are born with exceptional gifts … [that] will ultimately help them survive a future devastation.” Though the young protagonists are Black — at the time of the first book’s publication, few science fiction books featured Black protagonists — Hamil - ton said Blackness was not a central theme of the books as it had been in her previous works. “Over the last decade I have come to feel less preoc- cupied with my own heritage and roots and more aware of survivors of all kinds,” she told the News shortly before the first book in the trilogy was published. The pendulum swung again for Hamilton in 1985 when she released “The People Could Fly,” in which she retold two dozen Black American folk tales, accom - panied by illustrations from Diane and Leo Dillon. (A mural inspired by these sto- ries and illustrations adorns the side wall of the Yellow Springs News office.) The same year, the Virginia Ham - ilton Lectureship on Minority Group Experiences in Chil- dren’s Literature — today the Virginia Hamilton Conference on Multicultural Literature for Youth — was established at Kent State University, eventu - ally becoming the nation’s longest-running conference focused on multicultural youth literature. Hamilton continued to turn out new works for children and young adults nearly every year into the early 2000s. Over the course of her career, GREENE COUNTY C A R E E R C E N T E R • K E E P I N G W O R K F O R C E S T R O N G • 937-372-6941 • WWW . GREENECCC . COM Award-winning career/technical programs for high school and adult students.