Wittlinger graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Millikin University in Decatur, Ill., where a professor encouraged her writing and suggested she apply to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. “Art was her ticket out of her small town and her way of connecting with other people.” “She loved art,” said her daughter, Kate Pritchard of Nashville. She was the only child of Doris Malzahn Wittlinger and Karl Wittlinger, who owned a small, neighborhood grocery store.Īspiring to be a painter as a girl, she also wrote poems and kept diaries. “The rest of us will try as hard as we can to get it right.”īorn on Oct. “Getting the language right is especially important to the transgender community because, newly empowered, they want to lead the discourse themselves, as they should,” she added. “I wonder how long any of these words will remain up-to-date before they’re replaced with others viewed as more acceptable by another generation whose thoughts about the transgender experience will have evolved from our 2015 ideas,” Ms. Wittlinger revised “Parrotfish” for a new published edition because “the language we use to talk about transgender people has undergone a shift,” she wrote in 2015 on The Horn Book children’s literature website. Wittlinger spoke extensively with a transgender friend of her daughter’s, and the friend vetted the book for language and accuracy. While writing “Parrotfish,” which was published in 2007, Ms. “I don’t think writing outside of my sexual orientation is any more unusual than any of the other ways in which I stretch myself to understand the human psyche,” she said. I’ve written characters who speak to God, although I’m not at all religious,” she said in an interview quoted on the Lambda website.

I’ve written African-American characters and I’m not Black. “I’ve written male characters, and I’m not male. Wittlinger, who married a man and had two children, wrote about characters from many backgrounds other than her own.

“Parrotfish,” which also was nominated for a Lambda award, “was a rare story giving power to trans teens in a time when such stories were not being published,” Jensen wrote, adding that at the time, many readers considered it “the first time they saw themselves reflected in books written for them.” Wittlinger’s third novel, “Hard Love” (1999), which featured a teenage main character who had just come out as lesbian, was honored by Lambda Literary, an organization that champions LGBTQ books and writers.

Hard love by ellen wittlinger