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Joan Lowery Nixon, born on February 3rd, 1927, was the only four-time recipient of the Edgar Allan Poe Award for the Best Juvenile Mystery and she often said that she simply had to write! She relates that her mother remembered that Joan would say, “I have a poem, write it down,” even before she learned to read.
Well-known for her Orphan Train Adventures, she explained, “It was a part of history I hadn’t known—that beginning in 1854, over 100,000 homeless children were rescued from the streets of New York City and sent by train to new homes in the West.”
Another of her series tells the story of three teenagers who immigrated with their families from Russia, Ireland, and Sweden. Those are the Ellis Island novels.
Ms. Nixon’s Edgar Award winners were: The Kidnapping of Christina Lattimore (1980), The Seance (1981), The Other Side of Dark (1986) and The Name of the Game Was Murder (1994).
Honored with the 2002 Kerlan Award, more than eighty of her manuscripts are held by the Children’s Literature Research Collection at the University of Minnesota. Ms. Nixon died on June 28, 2003.