Deborah Wiles

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 my personal narrative and turn it into story." 2Personal life Deborah Wiles was born in Mobile, Alabama, the daughter of Marie Kilgore and Thomas Edwards, who was 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 fiv