Perkins, Lynne Rae (1956-…), an American author and illustrator of children’s books, won the 2006 Newbery Medal for her novel Criss Cross (2005). The Newbery Medal is awarded annually to the outstanding children’s book by an American. Criss Cross focuses on 14-year-old Debbie and her friends, who live in a small Midwestern town during the 1970’s. The novel sympathetically explores how they deal with the everyday problems that confront teenagers. The novel is illustrated with photographs and Perkins’s humorous drawings.
Criss Cross is Perkins’s second novel and a sequel to her first novel, All Alone in the Universe (1999), which also features Debbie. All Alone in the Universe deals with lost and new friendships. Perkins illustrated the novel with simple sketches.
Perkins has written and illustrated a number of picture books with a child as the central character. They include Home Lovely (1995), Clouds for Dinner (1997), The Broken Cat (2002), Snow Music (2003), and Frank and Lucky Get Schooled (2016). Nuts to You (2016), Wintercake (2019), and Violet and Jobie in the Wild (2022) are stories about animals. The Museum of Everything (2021) asks readers to imagine what they would put in a museum of favorite things.
Perkins was born on July 31, 1956, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She received a B.A. degree from Pennsylvania State University in 1978 and an M.A. degree from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1981.
