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Kimberly's books reveal the hesitancies, fears, expectations, and insights of young people who, by circumstances or family ties, have close relationships with people who are marginalized in our society because of "real" or "perceived" disabilities. Readers find familiar ground with her books because the starting point is usually one of silence and uncertainty-but the characters are strong and engaging, and they grow in their voice and perspective as they shape their lives around the needs and interests of peers and adults who might otherwise be excluded.

Kimberly Willis Holt is a vivacious, warm, and highly successful author whose books have won accolades and awards. At first glance, she may seem an unusual choice for a profile in an issue about inclusion. Look within the covers of her books, however, and you will find sharp, funny, and poignant insights into the day-to-day realities of characters whose struggles are central to our concerns about building inclusive worlds. Look beneath surface appearances and find a woman whose own experiences have helped her to become a keen and compassionate observer of such worlds.

Kimberly Willis Holt grew up in a world with little geographical stability. Because her father was a Navy chef, the family was constantly on the move-around the United States and as far as Paris and Guam. Place for Kimberly was not a location so much as a human community held together by her grandmother's white house with its tin roof in Forest Hills, Louisiana. Here, where seven generations of her family had grown up, she and her family could imagine its interior and surroundings, even if it was always distant in real life. She explains that although the settings in her books are ones she knows well, they come mainly from "a real, special place, my family."

Kimberly also recalls that she was a serious and shy child, the oldest in the family. In an interview on PBS (1999), she told interviewer Elizabeth Farnsworth that her early adolescence "were hard years for me. I think that I felt like an outsider. I always tend to write about outsiders." She loved books, and speaks with fond memories of reading and rereading Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. Discovering Carson McCullers's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter made her want to be a writer, and several of her seventh-grade teachers encouraged her efforts. Unfortunately, what confidence and desire she may have had was stifled for many years by another writing teacher who never offered a positive comment about her writing.

In part, her books succeed because they are so rooted in the emotionality of her own personal experiences. They also succeed because there are grains of truth that lie at the heart of each book. My Louisiana Sky (1999), her first book, is centered on Tiger-Ann Parker, a twelve-year-old girl who is the child of adults with developmental disabilities. As Tiger-Ann grows into adolescence and longs to fit in with her classmates, she grows increasingly uncomfortable and ashamed of her parents. When her grandmother, who had held the family together, dies suddenly, Tiger-Ann also resents the fact that she must increasingly assume the role of the adult in the family. Therefore, she jumps at the chance to accompany her sophisticated Aunt Doreen to Baton Rouge. Here, however, she realizes that big-city life is not as glamorous as it seemed and that her close-knit rural community has given her unrecognized strengths and emotional sustenance. She comes, especially, to recognize the unique gifts her parents have to offer her.

This sensitively told story has its roots in several aspects of Kimberly's life. As with so many of her stories, real events may provide the impetus to imagination. In an interview with K. T. Horning in School Library Journal (2000), Kimberly recalls a moment when she was nine years old:

I was in a car with my mother in the Louisiana piney woods where both my parents had grown up. That's where My Louisiana Sky takes place. We passed a lady on a country road with grocery sacks in her hands. The lady looked strange to me. She just had a different look about her on her face and I mentioned her to my mom and my mom said, "That lady's mentally retarded and her husband is mentally retarded and they have lots of kids." It haunted me for the rest of my life.

Later, when Kimberly started writing, she struggled with ideas until she recalled this incident. My Louisiana Sky "was the first story that came from my heart. The voice of Tiger-Ann-I just knew it right away. I kept thinking about it and thought maybe that would make an interesting book." In addition, as the first-born daughter of relatively young parents (they were both 20 when she was born), Kimberly reveals that she sometimes felt as if she "helped raise them." This aspect of her life may have also helped her write about Tiger-Ann "from the heart."

When Zachary Beaver Came to Town (1998) features another outsider, this time a massively overweight boy who makes a living traveling in a freak show. Toby Wilson, the book's narrator, and his best friend Cal approach Zachary as an object of embarrassed fascination, and Zachary returns their interest with barely disguised hostility. Toby and Cal leave Zachary's travel trailer and dismiss the incident as a minor amusement that has interrupted their long, hot Texas summer. Toby is more concerned by his mother's departure for the bright lights of Opryland where she hopes to win a singing contract, his testy relationship with his father, and his crush on the beautiful Scarlett Stalling. But when Zachary is abandoned by his guardian, Toby and Cal find themselves drawn to his plight. They reach out tentatively with donations of food and then gradually enter into a touchy friendship. Zachary, who has until now been able to hold the world at a distance, finds himself drawn out into this small community. Not only does he leave the safety of his trailer, but more important, he is drawn out of his emotional cocoon. Zachary, in turn, proves the catalyst for the healing of personal grief and troubled friendship. He is no longer seen as a freak but as a person of personality and depth.

As with My Louisiana Sky, Kimberly uses events in When Zachary Beaver Came to Town based on a real childhood experience. She recalls that when she was 13, she went to the Louisiana State Fair and paid two dollars to see the fattest boy in the world. "He was in a little trailer and we went in there, and I would like to say I wasn't nosy but of course I was. I was very quiet and shy and usually very sensitive towards people's feelings but for some reason-I guess paying two dollars and the fact that he was on display-gave me the right to ask him nosy questions and I did" (Horning, 2000, p. 45). Just like Cal in the book, Kimberly asked, "How much do you eat? How much do you weigh?" Some years later, she found a woman who had seen the boy at a shopping center near her office. Unlike Kimberly, this woman befriended the boy and ended up eating lunch with him every day. Kimberly confesses, "I just remember thinking, 'I didn't do that. I didn't come across in a kind way.' I think that even has some influence on the story, because of course, that's kind of what ends up happening with the boys and Zachary" (Horning, 2000, p. 45).

In these and other novels, such as Mister and Me (1998), Dancing in the Cadillac Light (2002), and Part of Me (2006), as well as her picturebook Waiting for Gregory (2006), Kimberly has continued to create real and engaging characters out of the pieces of her own life and the liveliness of her imagination. Her most recent book, Part of Me, is the story of four generations of a Louisiana family. The family is linked together through the character of matriarch Rose McGee Harp, whom Kimberly admits is as close to autobiographical as she'll ever get. As with her other books, however, "fiction starts with truth but moves away from it and becomes its own truth" (personal communication with Kiefer, October 7, 2006). The impetus for Rose's story grew out of a nonfiction book written by Kimberly's friend Kathi Appelt and her coauthor Jeanne Cannella Schmitzer titled, Down Cut Shin Creek: The Pack Horse Librarians of Kentucky, about a Works Progress Administration (WPA) project to deliver books to remote Appalachian communities during the depression.

The book included a photo of Louisiana librarians working in rural bayou areas. Kimberly also recalls the pleasure of listening to her parents read John Steinbeck's The Wayward Bus when she was a child. The images of the Louisiana librarians and Steinbeck's bus finally came together. When she decided to write an intergenerational story, she found a woman named Betty DeYeide Lockwood who, "at seventeen years old in the 1940's drove the Terrebonne Parish Library bookmobile," and whose memories also inspired Part of Me (Holt, 2006, p. 207). With these inspirations, Kimberly created another memorable family whose ties remain strong despite the problems that face so many working class, rural families.

Perhaps Kimberly's stories also succeed because of her distinctive voice. She explains that she came from a family of storytellers. Her grandmother, for example, wouldn't just come home from the store and say, "I got groceries." She'd tell about whom she met and what they were wearing and what tidbits of news she picked up along the way. Kimberly has inherited the ability to describe places and communities we might call home and characters we might call neighbor.

Kimberly's books reveal the hesitancies, fears, expectations, and insights of young people who, by circumstances or family ties, have close relationships with people who are marginalized in our society because of "real" or "perceived" disabilities. She explores what it means to become a person who sees into and with the eyes of someone who is so often overlooked or misunderstood. Readers find familiar ground with her books because the starting point is usually one of silence and uncertainty-but the characters are strong and engaging, and they grow in their voice and perspective as they shape their lives around the needs and interests of peers and adults who might otherwise be excluded.