Deborah Wiles
| Deborah Wiles | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born |
May 5, 1953 Mobile, Alabama |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | writer |
Deborah Wiles (born May 5, 1953, Mobile, Alabama, United States) is an award-winning children's book author. Her second novel, Each Little Bird That Sings, was a 2005 National Book Award finalist. Wiles received the PEN/Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship in 2004 and the E.B. White Read-Aloud Award in 2005. Her fiction centers on home, family, kinship, and community, and deals with historical events (Freedom Summer, the Cuban Missile Crisis) and childhood reactions to those events, as well as everyday childhood moments and mysteries, most taken directly from her childhood. She often says, "I take personal narrative and turn it into story."
Deborah Wiles was born in Mobile, Alabama, the daughter of Marie and Thomas Edwards, an air force pilot from Jasper County, Mississippi. Wiles' mother was from West Point, Mississippi, where she was a champion softball and basketball player. She was a stenographer working at Brookley Field in Mobile when she met her future husband on a blind date. They were married for 53 years. Wiles was their eldest child, followed by a brother, Michael (1954) and a sister, Cathy (1959). Wiles' father was transferred to Hickam AFB, and the family moved to Hawaii when Wiles was five. She started kindergarten at Pearl Harbor Elementary School. She wrote about her Hawaii memories in her first novel, Love, Ruby Lavender.
In 1961, Wiles's father was transferred to Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, D.C., where he was a special missions pilot and also served as chief of safety for the 89th Airlift Wing. The family would stay in the D.C. area for seven years. Wiles attended Camp Springs Elementary School in Camp Springs, and Roger B. Taney Jr. High School (now Thurgood Marshall Middle School) in Temple Hills, Maryland. This setting is the backdrop for Wiles' 2010 documentary novel Countdown, which takes place in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
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