Out Spotlight

Today's Out Spotlight was an American writer of fiction for children and young adults, best known for the lesbian novel Annie on My Mind. She received the 2003 Margaret Edwards Award from the American Library Association recognizing her lifetime contribution in writing for teens, citing Annie alone.

Today's Out Spotlight is Nancy Garden.

Antoinette Elisabeth Garden, who always went by Nancy, was born in Boston on May 15, 1938. Her family moved a few times during World War II, while her father worked for the Red Cross. When she was young, her parents read aloud to each other, and Garden wrote on her website that she “started writing for fun” when she was 8.

Her family settled in Providence, Rhode Island, and while at Lincoln School “she was interested in theater and was considered the best actress in her class,” said Sandy Scott, her life partner. The pair met in high school, but did not become a couple until they both were living in New York City in the 1960s. They married in 2004.

Garden graduated from Columbia University with a bachelor’s degree, and received a master’s from Columbia’s Teachers College. She worked as a teacher and in various theater pursuits until 1971, when her first two books were published. One of those, “What Happened in Marston,” was made into an ABC Afterschool Special.

She took an editing job in children's literature for a publisher based in Boston and moved in 1972 to Carlisle, Massachusetts, with Scott, who recalled that they encountered no difficulties getting a mortgage and buying a house together. “Both Nancy and I have been accepted in Carlisle,” she said.

Before long, she was able to write full time. Her many other books include “Endgame,” which grew out of the Columbine High School shootings in Littleton, Colo. “I decided to write a novel focused on bullying and the tragic consequences it can have on both bullier and bullied,” she wrote on her website. “ ‘Endgame’ is the result.”

In 2007’s “Hear Us Out” she collected her short stories and grouped them into sections for the decades from the 1950s to the 2000s, introducing each decade with an essay.

Garden has written over 35 books, including non-fiction, mystery and fantasy for children and young adults.

But she is best known for Annie on My Mind, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1982. It was critically acclaimed but attracted controversy because of its lesbian characters, Annie and Liza, who fall in love. It was one of the first teen novels to feature lesbian characters in a positive light. "I wrote it to give solace to young gay people, to let them know they were not alone, that they could be happy and well adjusted and also to let heterosexual kids know that we gay people aren't monsters," she told Booklist in a 1996 interview.

In 1993, Annie on My Mind was banned by the Kansas City school system and burnt in demonstrations. It was returned to shelves only after a First Amendment lawsuit by students in 1995. It is #44 on the American Library Association list of 100 books most frequently challenged during the 1990s.

Her reviews of young adult titles have appeared in the Lambda Literary Foundation's Lambda Book Report.

Garden spoke of her career saying, "I feel very lucky to be able to do the things I love: writing books, talking with kids and adults about writing, and sometimes also teaching writing."

She received the Robert B. Downs Award for Intellectual Freedom in 2001 from the University of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Science.

The American Library Association's Margaret A. Edwards Award recognizes one writer and a particular body of work "for significant and lasting contribution to young adult literature." Garden won the annual award in 2003, when the panel cited Annie on My Mind alone and called her "the first author for young adults to create a lesbian love story with a positive ending ... Using a fluid, readable style, Garden opens a window through which readers can find courage to be true to themselves." Five years later Garden recalled that "I was and still am enormously grateful ... for YALSA’s recognition ... of the importance of YA books about LGBT youth."

Annie On My Mind was also awarded the Lee Lynch Classic Award by the Golden Crown Literary Society in 2014, cited as one of the most important classics in lesbian literature.

Garden and Scott divided their time living between their home in Carlisle Massachusetts and a home in Tremont, Maine, along with their golden retriever, Loki, and their cats.

Garden died of a heart attack on June 23, 2014, aged 76.

“She wrote the book all lesbians wanted to have as teenagers,” Victoria Brownworth said in a tribute posted on the Lambda Literary website. “She wrote the books kids of lesbian and gay parents needed to read. She was an icon and a treasure and every other overused cliche about writers who are larger than life — except of course in her case it was all true.”