Author Helen Frost was born in Brookings, South Dakota in 1949. She received a Bachelors degree in Elementary Education with an English concentration from Syracuse University and a Masters degree in English from Indiana University. She has taught writing from pre-school through university and has published poetry, children's books, anthologies, a play, and a book about teaching writing. Skin of a Fish, Bones of a Bird, a collection of poetry, won the Women Poets Series Competition in 1993. Poems from that collection were awarded the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award and the Mary Carolyn Davies Memorial Award by the Poetry Society of America. She worked with the Fort Wayne YWCA and the Fort Wayne Youtheatre to help high school students write about how they had been affected by violence. This workshop led to a play and an anthology of student writing, both entitled Why Darkness Seems So Light. Keesha's House was awarded a Michael L. Printz Honor from the American Library Association in 2004.
