Erin Entrada Kelly

Erin Entrada Kelly is a children’s fiction author best known for winning the John Newbery Medal for her third novel “Hello Universe.” Kelly is a Filipina America and loves to refer to herself as mestiza which means that she is of mixed race. Her mother is Filipino from the island of Cebu in the Philippines while her father is a white American. As a young single mother, she attended college while working at a newspaper, even as she wrote her novels. It was during this time that she also had to take care of her child Carolanne. She took one class a semester and it took a decade to finally graduate with an MFA in Creative Writing from Rosemont College. Kelly is currently a professor of children’s literature in the publishing and graduate fiction programs at Rosemont College. Entrada’s fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Philippines Free Press Literary Award. Erin was born in Lake Charles Louisiana in 1977 to Virgilia Entrada, a Filipino immigrant and Dennis Ray Kelly an American. Growing up was quite an experience as Erin was the only mestizo Filipino in her class, in a town where there were very few Asians. She desperately wanted to be like everyone else and fit in but she did not have the blue eyes and could never be normal. Given her experiences growing up as a bullied child that was often the outsider, she writes about similar characters in her novels.