Thanhha Lai was born in 1965 in Vietnam. She is an American writer of children's literature. At the Fall of Saigon April 30, 1975, her soldier father was missing in action. Mother and children fled to the United States and moved to Montgomery,Alabama, because one man there was willing to sponsor all ten of them. Before high school, the family had moved to Fort Worth, Texas. Lai graduated from University of Texas, Austin with a degree in journalism and from 1988 worked about two years for the Orange County, California newspaper The Register, covering Little Saigon, the local Vietnamese community. She earned a Master of Fine Arts from New York University and settled in New York City, where she teaches at Parsons The New School for Design. In 2011, she won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature and a Newbery Honor for her debut novel, Inside Out & Back Again, published by HarperCollins. It is a verse novel based on her first year in the United States, a ten-year-old child who spoke no English when she arrived. In 2013 this novel made The New York Times best seller list. 030 (Bowker Author Biography)