Vera Williams

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American children's writer and illustrator whose best known work, A Chair for My Mother (1982), has won multiple awards and was featured on the children's television show Reading Rainbow. For her lifetime contribution as a children's illustrator she was U.S. nominee in 2004 for the biennial, international Hans Christian Andersen Award, the highest recognition available to creators of children's books. Additionally, she was awarded the 2009 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature. While at Black Mountain College, she married fellow student Paul Williams. The couple divorced in 1970. Together they had three children. She taught at alternative schools in New York and Ontario throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. Following her divorce, she emigrated to Canada, where she committed to becoming a children's author and illustrator. Williams long supported nonviolent and nuclear disarmament causes. She contributed artwork for several covers of Liberation magazine. In 1981 she spent a month in Alderson Federal Prison Camp following arrest at a women's peaceful blockade of the Pentagon. She served on the executive committee of the War Resisters League from 1984 to 1987. She died on 16 October 2015 at age 88 in Narrowsburg, New York. Link to Wikipedia biography