Author Linda Sue Park Wins Empire State Author Award
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By Rocco Staino -- School Library Journal, 10/19/2009
Newbery Medal-winning author Linda Sue Park is this year’s winner of the Empire State Author Award, given to a New York State children’s or YA author for a body of work.
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Linda Sue Park (left) with Rose Stuart, a member of the Youth Services Section of the New York Library Association with the Empire State Author Award. |
Park, 49, has written more than a dozen books, including the Newbery Medal-winning A Single Shard (Clarion, 2001), about an orphan in 12th-century Korea.
Twenty years ago, after living in Chicago, France, England, and Ireland, Park settled in New York State. It was fate that she ended up a New Yorker, because, as a child, she loved books set in New York. Sidney Taylor’s All of a Kind Family (Delacorte, 1951) made her want to be Jewish and poor, so much so that Park, a Korean American, learned to make latkes and fasted on Yom Kippur.
Other of Park’s favorites included E. L. Konigsburg’s The Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (Atheneum, 1967), the tale of a sister and brother who run away from their suburban home to live in the Metropolitan Museum, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (HarperCollins, 1947) by Betty Smith, which made Park insist that she and her husband live in Brooklyn when the family relocated to New York City. In addition, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Farmer Boy (HarperCollins, 1953) instilled in Park a love of the rural parts of the state, which brought Park to her current home in Rochester, NY.
The move to New York also led the author to add the New York Mets alongside her lifelong allegiance to the Chicago Cubs. Being a fan of both continually losing teams trained her well because they annually raised her hopes of victory, which were always dashed with defeat by the end of each season.
“This hope/defeat cycle is the same for a writer,” says Park, who at the age of 10 was recognized by a local paper for her writing skills. At the time, she said she wanted to become a “writer of children’s stories.”
Her most recent book, Keeping Score (Clarion, 2008) includes both baseball and Brooklyn. Set during the Korean War, it tells the story of a girl’s love for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Her serialized story, A Long Walk to Water, which currently appears in newspapers across the country, is based on the true story of Salva, one of some 3,800 Sudanese "Lost Boys" airlifted to the United States beginning in the mid 1990s, and how he is adjusting to his new home in upstate New York.
In a new venture with Scholastic, Park will pen book nine of the “39 Clues” series, an interactive experience that features the characters of Amy and Dan Cahill traveling the world to solve the clues left in their grandmother’s will.
“I took on the challenge because I feel that books that attract reluctant readers must be well written,” Park says about the “39 Clues” project, scheduled for release on May 25, 2010.
