Introduction


Cynthia Voigt
Cynthia Voigt is all about family. Though her written work covers a wide variety of topics, she is best known for the Tillerman saga, a series of family stories played out over seven books. The abandonment of the Tillerman children in the first book of the series serves as the catalyst for the entire cycle as the children struggle to find some sense of normalcy. For writers of previous generations, the nuclear family was the norm in children’s literature. But in the nontraditional worlds Voigt created, she writes beautifully of children whose background and parentage had previously been underrepresented.

Essential Facts

  1. Before embarking on her career as a writer of youth fiction, Voigt worked in both advertising and education.
  2. Voigt was born in Boston and educated at Smith College. As a result, Massachusetts settings recur in her writing.
  3. Voigt’s writing process is, by her own description, something akin to assembling a puzzle: once ideas begin to formulate, she writes to see how the pieces fit together.
  4. Though the Tillerman cycle is her most famous, Voigt has written several others, including the Kingdom series that, unlike the rest of her work, takes place in the medieval period.
  5. The second book in Voigt’s Tillerman cycle, Dicey’s Song, won the prestigious Newbery Medal, an honor specifically created for achievement in children’s literature.