Kristin Hunter Lattany was a young adult writer. The bulk of her work deals with race relations and variations on the theme of growing up Black (and often poor) in America. Translated into several languages and rewritten as screenplays, Lattany's work also provides a lens through which to visualize and analyze Black urban life after integration.

Lattany was born on September 12, 1931, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in a comfortable, middle-class neighborhood near Camden, New Jersey. She was an only child, but she grew up in an extended family, which included her father, George L. Eggleston, a military man and a school principal, and her mother, Mabel Manigault-Eggleston, a pharmacist and teacher, her grandmother and two aunts. At an early age, Lattany discovered her two passions, reading and swimming. By age 4, she was reaading adult books, which she smuggled from her parents' library.

Both of Kristin Lattany's parents pushed her to become a teacher, so she enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania in nearby Philadelphia as an education major -- a degree she completed but her teaching career (in a third-grade classroom) lasted only four months. Lattany knew without a doubt that she wanted to be a writer, so she broke her contract with the Camden school board and resigned from her teaching post.

Lattany was in her early teens when she began working as a columnist and feature writer for the Philadelphia edition of the Pittsburgh Courier. That experience brought her into contact with other Black writers and journalists; so as a young woman, she moved to Philadelphia and set about achieving her goals.

From the 1950s and early 1960s, Lattany held a series of jobs as an advertising copywriter for Lavenson Bureau of Advertising (1952-1959) and Werman & Schorr, Inc. (1962-1963) in Philadelphia; research assistant, University of Pennsylvania (1961-1962); and information officer for the City of Philadelphia (1963-1966). In the 1970s, she began teaching again -- this time on the college level as a lecturer (1972-1979), adjunct associate professor of English (1981-1983) and senior lecturer (1983-1995) in the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania. She also served as director of the Walt Whitman Poetry Center in Camden, New Jersey (1978-1979), and as a writer-in-residence at Emory University in Atlanta in 1979.

Lattany's debut novel, "God Bless the Child, was published in 1964. Her books for adults include "Landlord," which became a motion picture, "Do Unto Others," "Lakestown Rebellion" and "Kinfolks." Her children's books include "Boss Cat," "Guests in the Promised Land," which was nominated for a National Book Award, and the bestselling "Soul Brothers and Sister Lou."

Throughout her career, Lattany received numerous awards for her work as author and artist for children and young adults. The Fund for the Republic awarded her first prize of $1,500 for a telelvision script on school segregation. Titled "A Minority of One," its revised and abbreviated form appeared on the CBS series "A Light Unto My Feet" in 1956. In 1959, she was awarded a John Hay Whitney Fellowship for minority group writing, and in 1965, she received the Athenaeum of Philadelphia Literary Award. "The Soul Brothers and Sister Lou" received the 1968 award of the Council on Interracial Books for Children for the best book by a Black author for ages 12 to 16 and the 1969 National Mass Media Brotherhood Gold Medal Award. In 1996, she was awarded the Black Writing Celebration Lifetime Achievement Award from Moonstone.

She married John L. Lattany on June 22, 1968, and was stepmother to two children, John Jr. and Andrew Lattany. Lattany died on Nov. 14, 2008.