Author Zilpha Keatley Snyder has died at age 87, according to Publisher’s Weekly.  She won three Newbery Honors for her novels for middle graders. 

I love this quote from the Publisher’s Weekly article about her writing and her connection with middle graders:

By the early 1960s back in California, Snyder’s two children (a foster son would join the family a few years later) were in school and she found the time to begin writing in earnest. She carved out hours for writing while working around her teaching joband said in her autobiography that her time with her students “had given me a deep appreciation of the gifts and graces that are specific to individuals with 10 or 11 years of experience as human beings.” “It is, I think, a magical time – when so much has been learned, but not yet enough to entirely extinguish the magical reach and freedom of early childhood.”