Virginia Hamilton has received nearly every possible honor for her writing, including what many consider the Nobel Prize of children's literature - the Hans Christian Andersen Award. Her ability to create multifaceted characters, engaging plots, thought-provoking language patterns, and strikingly imaginative portraits of black experience has won the respect of readers of all ages.

A folklore scholar and a writer who has produced a notable example of almost every genre for children - realistic fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, biography, legend, myth, folk tale, and picturebook - Hamilton has published 30 children's books over the last 26 years, among them Zeely (1967), MC Higgins the Great (1974), the Justice trilogy (1980-81), Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush (1982), and The Magical Adventures of Pretty Pearl (1983).

In this first book-length study of Hamilton, Nina Mikkelsen presents a writer who has broadened readers' knowledge of the African-American cultural experience specifically and deepened their understanding of human strengths and conflicts generally.

Mikkelsen focuses on the various purposes of stories and storytelling in Hamilton's books, especially the way she reveals characters sharing stories and thinking in terms of stories in order to move the main story forward, slow it down, or stop the action completely, for a number of reasons.

Mikkelsen begins with a biographical portrait of Hamilton as a child growing up in a large, rural African-American storytelling family, in which the nurturing of narrative produced in Hamilton both a wealth of material from which to later draw and a vibrant imagination to weave these materials through her fiction.

Proceeding chronologically, Mikkelsen analyzes Hamilton's realistic fiction, her fiction of psychic realism, young adult fiction, realistic fiction for younger readers, biographies, folklore collections, and fantasy.

Citing Hamilton's narrative process, personal knowledge of parallel cultures, and her strong commitment to multicultural concerns, narrative creativity, and diversity, Mikkelsen finds the author's talents more akin to those of Toni Morrison than to other children's writers. If we examine the way stories work in Hamilton's books, Mikkelsen argues, we begin to see more about Virginia Hamilton the person, the writer, the artist, and the wordkeeper of ethnic heritage.

And with this timely and engaging analysis, we can also see why writing through storytelling produces such richly textured, deeply layered fiction - which is the secret of Hamilton's success.