Nancy Willard

Nancy Willard (June 26, 1936 – February 19, 2017) was an American writer: novelist, poet, author and occasional illustrator of children's books. She won the 1982 Newbery Medal for A Visit to William Blake's Inn.

Willard was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she later received the B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and won five Hopwood Awards for creative writing. She also studied at Stanford University, where she received her M.A.

Her first novel, Things Invisible to See (1985), is set in her home town of Ann Arbor in the 1940s. Two brothers become involved with a paralyzed young woman, and it "ends with a baseball game that anticipates the film Field of Dreams in its player lineup of baseball luminaries. Susan Fromberg Schaeffer said the novel 'has the quality of a fairy tale ... a paradigm of life as a Manichean conflict between good and evil'."

Willard moved to Poughkeepsie, New York in 1964 and married Eric Lindbloom. In 1965she became first a professor at Vassar College and later a lecturer, giving up her tenure to focus on writing. She retired from Vassar in 2013.

All three volumes of Anatole stories were published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich with illustrations by David McPhail. A collected reissue will be published by New York Review Books’ YA imprint NYRB Kids in November 2018.

• Sailing to Cythera, and other Anatole Stories (1974)
• The Island of the Grass King: The Further Adventures of Anatole (1979)
• Uncle Terrible: More Adventures of Anatole (1982)

A Visit to William Blake's Inn, illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen, was published by Harcourt Brace in 1981. The text is a collection of poems with prose introduction and epilogue, all by Willard. It features a child's overnight stay at "William Blake's Inn", inhabited by Blake and several wonderful creatures.

Willard won the Newbery Medal for the work and the Provensens were one runner-up for the Caldecott Medal. The two annual awards by professional children's librarians recognize the year's "most distinguished contribution to American children's literature" and "most distinguished American picture book for children".

The first two books of the Anatole trilogy were named to the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award list in 1977 and 1979. The University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Education from 1958 to 1979 annually named several "all time" books that belong on the same shelf as Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.

• Devins Award for Poetry, 1967
• O. Henry Award, 1970
• Newbery Medal, 1982
• National Endowment for the Arts, Literature Fellowship, 1976 and 1987