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Three hours after learning Monday that she won the Newbery Medal, the top prize in children's books, Lynne Rae Perkins apologized for still being in shock.
She also was apologetic for having only 20 minutes to talk about Criss Cross (Greenwillow, $15.99), her gentle, coming-of-age novel about a group of 14-year-olds coping with the everyday concerns of 14-year-olds (boyfriends, girlfriends, parents, clothes and feeling different).
At her home in Suttons Bay, Mich., not far from Traverse City in the northwestern part of the state, Perkins suddenly found herself packing for a flight to New York. She's scheduled to be interviewed this morning on NBC's Today.
It's her TV debut, she says.
Just as suddenly, Criss Cross is a best seller. After Monday's Newbery announcement, it soared from No. 304,803 on Amazon.com's sales rankings to No. 26. The publisher says it's increasing the number of copies in print from 20,000 to 100,000.
Perkins, 49, says her second novel, which she also illustrated, was inspired by her own adolescence as a "late bloomer" who needed reassurance that "life doesn't always happen like it does in movies and books, but that's OK."
The mother of two (her daughter is 14, her son is 12), Perkins was an avid reader when she growing up outside Pittsburgh. But she dreamed of becoming an artist, not a writer.
She studied art at Penn State and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. In 1993, when she showed her portfolio to Ava Weiss, who was then the art director of Greenwillow Books, Weiss asked Perkins whether she had written anything.
"Later I learned she asked that of everyone, but I didn't know that," Perkins says. "So I wrote a story, and to my amazement, they published it."
Her first effort, the picture book Home Lovely (1995), is about a girl who is growing up in an isolated trailer and is enthralled by her mother's magazine, Home Lovely. It launched Perkins' career. She has published three other picture books and another novel, All Alone in the Universe (1999), which introduced Debbie, the girl at the heart of Criss Cross.
Perkins now looks back on Weiss' simple question about writing. "It was good she didn't ask me if I could walk a tightrope," she says with a laugh.
Then it was back to packing.
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