Ellen Levine |
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As a child, Ellen Levine "loved to curl up with a book, shut out
the world around me, and travel to other times and places." As an adult, Ms. Levine has
followed many career paths: lawyer, film producer, teacher, cartoonist, and author.
While she enjoys reading and writing fiction, most of her books for young readers
have been nonfiction. "Nonfiction lets me in 'behind the scenes' of the story," she
explains. Levine does an enormous amount research for her books, and savors the whole
learning experience that comes from writing about people and times, past and present. In
the course of her research, she has witnessed an emergency operation on a cow and held a
rifle that belonged to Annie Oakley, and screened rare film footage of the world-
renowned prima ballerina, Anna Pavlova.
Levine likes to share with young readers her love and the excitement of digging up
information, and by example shows that "there's more to research than going to an
encyclopedia, copying information, and calling it a report."
For Freedom's Children, which was awarded the 1994 Jane
Addams Children's Book Award, Ms. Levine interviewed thirty African Americans who
as children and teenagers were civil rights activists in the 1950s and 1960s. Some were
the first blacks to attend all-white schools; others participated in sit-ins and protest
marches. All helped to change the world around them and change their own lives in the
process.
"I wanted both adults and children to realize how important young people were to
the civil rights movement," Ms. Levine says. "No one has ever really told the stories of
the thousands of elementary and high school kids who were the backbone of the
movement. These young people found a joy in their struggle for justice, and they
exercised a discipline few adults thought them capable of. A belief that the world can be a
better place and that individuals can actively participate in change, is even more urgent
today when the centers of power seem so far from our lives."
In her latest book, A Fence Away From Freedom, Levine explores
the Japanese American experience during World War II. In 1942, shortly after the
bombing of Pearl Harbor, nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans on the West Coast, many
of whom had been born in the U.S., were taken from their homes by order of the
government and placed in prison camps. In a series of moving interviews, Japanese
Americans who were children and teenagers at the time tell how their families lost
homes, businesses, and personal possessions. These stories tell of hurtful discrimination,
unexpected kindness, and extraordinary courage. Through the voices of these young
people, Levine says she wants "to convey the magnitude of an event in which thousands
of people, convicted of no crime, were locked in prison camps in a country proud of its
democratic traditions. To prevent another such explosion of hatred in our midst, we must
listen to them."
Ellen Levine divides her time between New York City and Salem, New York.
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