It’s the birthday of Pam Muñoz Ryan (b. 1951), author of more than forty children’s books ranging from picture books to YA novels and the 2018 U.S. nominee for the international Hans Christian Andersen Award, which award is a Big Hairy Deal in the world of children’s book awards.

Muñoz Ryan was born Pamela Jeanne Banducci in Bakersfield, CA; half her family was from Mexico and half from Oklahoma. Before she started school, her last name was changed to Bell to match the names of her mother and stepfather, whom she considered her real father. She changed her name to Ryan when she married James Ryan in 1975, and when she eventually started writing children’s books, she began using her family name, Muñoz, as well.

Muñoz Ryan read obsessively as a child and loved her grandmother’s set of encyclopedias, particularly volume G (Greek mythology). Muñoz Ryan didn’t fit in with other children, so going to the library and reading was an escape, but it didn’t occur to her to become a writer for many years. She got her bachelor’s from San Diego State University and worked as an early childhood teacher before putting her career on hold for twelve years to have four children. (You wouldn’t think it would take twelve years, given that two of them were twins. Just an observation, not a judgment.) She eventually became the director of an early childhood program while also getting a master’s in Post-secondary Education with the goal of teaching children’s lit. However, a professor encouraged her to consider writing children’s lit instead of teaching it, and she began to do so, embarking on the long hard sucky road of rejection before publishing her first picture book, One Hundred Is a Family, in 1994.

One of Muñoz Ryan’s best-known books is Esperanza Rising (2000), which is based on Muñoz Ryan’s grandmother’s experience immigrating from Mexico to California and is the sort of book that fifth graders read, which I know because my older son’s fantastic fifth grade teacher read it to his class. Other novels include Riding Freedom (1998); Becoming Naomi León (2004); The Dreamer (2010), a fictional account of the childhood of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda; and Echo (2015). All of these novels have won big buttery handfuls of awards—seriously, just a huge long list that could choke an ox.

Muñoz Ryan, who lives with her husband near San Diego, has five grandchildren and a dog named Wally, and if you go to her website you can find a picture of Wally, who has the soulful, slightly guilty eyes of a Beagle/Basset mix. Muñoz Ryan’s latest book is Mañanaland, released in March of 2020.

Have a very merry Christmas if you celebrate, stay well and mask up, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.