Learn more about our 2024 Mountain Readers Become Leaders program and sign up to be a volunteer reader!
Nominate an exceptional West Virginia teacher today!
On Demand
On Demand
Watch locally produced documentaries & more.
On Demand
On Demand
West Virginia Morning
Inside Appalachia
West Virginia Week
Mountain Stage
Us & Them
The Legislature Today
Send us your comments and questions.
Stream our board meetings.
Check out the latest WVPB news.
Sign up for our newsletter and get weekly updates.
Meet the WVPB staff.
WV Educational Broadcasting Authority, the WVPB Foundation, and the Friends of WVPB.
Come work with us!
Sponsor impactful and engaging media and entertainment.
Use your IRA to make a gift to WVPB.
Become a member with your gift of $1,000 or more.
Children’s author Cynthia Rylant was born June 6, 1954, in Hopewell, West Virginia.
She was raised in Raleigh County and earned degrees from Morris Harvey College—which is now the University of Charleston—and Marshall and Kent State universities.
She credits her youthful experiences in West Virginia as the wellspring of her writing, including the children’s books When I Was Young in the Mountains and The Relatives Came, both of which received the prestigious Caldecott Honor for children’s literature. Her first book of poetry, Waiting to Waltz, draws upon the decade she lived in the town of Beaver.
Rylant has also published picture books, short stories, poetry collections, nonfiction, and novels. And her popular Henry and Mudge series for young readers features more than 20 books.
Rylant’s work has won every major award in the field of children’s literature. A Fine White Dust received a Newbery Honor. Appalachia: The Voices of Sleeping Birds won the 1991 Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for nonfiction, and her book Missing May received the same award for children’s fiction in addition to the Newbery Medal.
Today, Cynthia Rylant lives and writes in Oregon.
