E.L.Konigsburg - a tribute

To E.L. Konigsburg

Elaine Lobl Konigsburg, two-time Newbery Medalist--in 1968 for From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler; and again in 1997 for The View from Saturday--died on Friday, April 19, at the age of 83.

Is the Metropolitan Museum of Art the place
to which you wanted to run when you were a child?

How well you embodied the yearnings of young Claudia
as she stole away to a place of comfort.
You captured a New York in which children
could walk 40 blocks from the Met
to the main branch of the New York Public Library
in search of answers,
and then to the Donnell--
then devoted to children, and now closed.

How did it feel
to be one of the elite handful
who has won two Newbery Medals,
for From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler in 1968,
and in 1997 for The View from Saturday?
And the only author to win a Newbery Medal and Honor
in the same year--1968 (the Newbery Honor went to
Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth)
for your first two novels?

At a luncheon for Silent to the Bone
you spoke of the connection between Branwell's muteness
and "ma," the Japanese term for what we call "negative space."
Ma suggests a simultaneous awareness of form and non-form
resulting in an intensification of vision.

"Negative space" omits the idea of holding both
form and non-form at once.
Even though you are no longer with us,
your words, your awareness, your insights
into human nature remain.
You've made art, language, and life richer.

--Jennifer M. Brown
Shelf Awareness

And from HuffPost - 

E.L. Konigsburg Dead: Award-Winning Children's Book Author Dies