Bio in Brief

Michelle Y. Green is a freelance writer who lives, writes, and raises two sons in Upper Marlboro, Maryland. A graduate of the University of Maryland College of Journalism and the Johns Hopkins University Masters Program in Writing, she teaches "The Art of Writing for Children" and two other courses at The George Washington University School of Continuing Education.

Meet Michelle Y. Green

When I was in the fourth and fifth grades, I had a wonderful teacher, Miss Rowell, who used to read to us for as much as an hour every day. We would come in from the playground, all hot and sweaty, with a full stomach from lunch, and she would invite us to put our heads on our desks and listen as she read the Little House on the Prairie books. It was the best part of my day.

I couldn't have been more different from Laura Ingalls. I was living in Ramstein, Germany-she lived on the prairie a continent away. I was an African American girl in the 1960s-she was a white girl in the 1800s. Yet, when Miss Rowell read, we connected through imagination, and all our differences fell away.

The words were so vivid, it was as if I could hear Pa's fiddle, feel the rough fabric of Laura's homemade dresses, and smell the stew from Ma's cook stove. That's when I knew I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to create pictures in people's imagination that let them connect across time, geographical boundaries, cultures, and experiences. I dreamed of creating stories that would explore our differences, but show what we all have in common. It took nearly 30 years for that dream to get under way, but I've never forgotten the reason I wanted to write in the first place.

I particularly like to explore little-known aspects of African American culture that dismiss the many negative stereotypes that exist about people of color. For example, did you know that while the rest of the country was in the economic chaos and racial strife of The Great Depression, the coal-mining town of Jenkins was a prosperous, multi-ethnic community in which a man was measured not by the color of his skin, but by the strength of his back? Or that with two strikes against her--gender and race--a young colored girl succeeded in her dream of pitching professional baseball on a men's team? Or that the heroic story of The Tuskegee Airmen does not end with the desegregation of the Armed Forces, or that the pilots who taught them aerobatics and pulled practice targets were women? Or that some Native American tribes established permanent towns and embraced emancipated Blacks as family?

I love exploring these "holes in history" and sharing them with readers of all ages. And I particularly love reminding children and grown-ups that dreams still come true. My being a writer, after all, is living proof of that.