[homoe]

Eloise Greenfield, Who Wrote to Enlighten Black Children, Dies at 92. In nearly 50 books, written in poetry and prose, she described the lives of ordinary people and heroes like Rosa Parks and Paul Robeson. “Eloise Greenfield brought joy and enlightenment into the world,” the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation, which celebrates diversity in children’s literature, said in a message on Twitter after her death. “At the same time she broadened the path toward a more diverse American literature for children.”

Ms. Greenfield turned to children’s books after joining the D.C. Black Writers’ Workshop in 1971, receiving encouragement from the head of the workshop’s children’s book division to write a biography of Parks for young readers. That book was published in 1973, a year after she published “Bubbles” (later retitled “Good News”), about a boy learning to read. Ms. Greenfield began writing for children in her early 40s with a mission to “document our existence and depict African Americans living, as we do in real life,” she told the website Brown Bookshelf in 2008. In 48 books, she wrote about everyday subjects (the things a young girl loves, a boy rapping, a father’s death) and historical figures (biographies of Paul Robeson, Rosa Parks and Mary McLeod Bethune). For her book “The Great Migration: Journey to the North” (2010), Ms. Greenfield drew on family history — like her parents’ decision in 1929 to leave Parmele, N.C., where she was born, for Washington when she was three months old. And she plumbed Black history in the poetry collection “The Women Who Caught the Babies: A Story of African American Midwives” (2019)

Eloise was such a frequent reader of books from her local library that she got a part-time job there after graduating from high school. Early on, she wanted to teach, so she enrolled in Miner Teachers College (ultimately to be absorbed by the University of the District of Columbia), but left during her junior year because of her shyness and discomfort at being the center of students’ attention. For the next 20 years or so she held various jobs, including one as a clerk-typist at the United States Patent and Trademark Office. In the 1960s, she wrote poems and short stories, but she met with a lot of rejection. One poem, “To a Violin,” was published in 1962 in The Hartford Times in Connecticut (it closed in 1976), and some of her stories were accepted by Negro Digest (later Black World).

Her work is the most illustrative I’ve ever worked with,” Ms. Gilchrist said by phone. “I could see the pictures through her word selection, and, together with her rhythm and rhyme, the words were easy to illustrate.”

Ms. Greenfield’s honors include the Coretta Scott King Author Award in 1978 for “Africa Dream,” about a Black girl’s nocturnal vision of visiting her ancestral homeland, and the Education for Liberation Award in 2016 from Teaching for Change, an organization that gives parents and teachers tools to help students learn to “read, write and change the world. ”“When I write, I’m composing — combining meanings, the rhythms, the melody of language, in the hope that it can be a gift to others,” she said in 2018 when she accepted the Coretta Scott King-Virginia Hamilton Award for lifetime achievement, which the American Library Association gives to Black authors and illustrators.