about the author

While Karen Hesse was growing up in Baltimore, Maryland, she dreamed of becoming many things, including an archaeologist, an ambassador, an actor, and an author. Over the course of her life, she has worked as a waitress, a nanny, a librarian, a personnel officer, an agricultural laborer, an advertising secretary, a typesetter, a proofreader, a mental health-care provider, a substitute teacher, and a book reviewer. And, throughout it all, she wrote.

She is the award-winning author of over twenty books for children and young adults, including Letters from Rifka, Witness, and Brooklyn Bridge. In 1998, she won the Newbery Medal for Out of the Dust, and was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellows Grant in 2002.

Now living in Vermont with her husband, Randy, Hesse pairs her love of hiking with photography, going out almost daily to record what she sees. When given the chance to enhance the reader’s experience of Safekeeping with some of her photographs, she accepted without hesitation. Despite having a vast body of existing images to choose from, Hesse was determined to travel the entire route herself at the same time of year as Radley. As she describes it, “That long walk took place in the spring of 2011 … a very, very wet spring in New England. Undeterred, I dressed in raincoat, rain hat, and rain pants, Velcroed myself into an orange traffic vest, and exposed my poor camera to the most miserable conditions: rain, wind, fog, bugs, the buffeting of huge trucks. I believe this feet-on-the-ground research contributed to the authenticity of Radley’s narrative. It certainly gave me insight I would never have had otherwise.”

Visit Karen Hesse online at karenhesseblog.wordpress.com.