Brent Ashabranner

Brent Kenneth Ashabranner (November 3, 1921 – December 1, 2016) was an American Peace Corps administrator, including its 1967–69 deputy director, and author of more than 30 books, primarily non-fiction children's literature, which received over 40 awards.

Early life Ashabranner was born in 1921 in Shawnee, Oklahoma. His family later moved to El Reno and then Bristow due to economic hardship during the Great Depression. An avid reader and writer with interests in foreign countries, track, and tennis, he graduated from high school in 1939.

Ashabranner studied English at Oklahoma A&M, where he discovered influential writers and met his future wife, Martha White. Encouraged by a professor to write pulp Westerns, he earned extra income from fiction and later took a part-time campus job. They married in mid-1941. His brother Gerard, self-taught in law, passed the state bar and became a practicing attorney.

After the U.S. entered World War II, Ashabranner joined the Navy Seabees and served in the Pacific. Ashabranner's daughter Melissa earned degrees from Temple University and Yale, while daughter Jennifer trained professionally in pet grooming and photography. Ashabranner and his wife then returned oversees while he worked with the philanthropic Ford Foundation, moving from the Philippines to Indonesia in 1976.

Full-time writing In 1980, Ashabranner and his wife returned to America to be near their daughters and devote his full-time work to writing non-fiction books for young readers. Most of his more recent work is illustrated by Paul Conklin, whom Ashabranner first met in Nigeria. Daughter Jennifer also illustrated several of Ashabranner's books, beginning with Always to Remember (1988) about the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. He collaborated with daughter Melissa in Into a Strange Land (1987) and Counting America (1989). Ashabranner won the Carter G. Woodson Award "for the most distinguished books appropriate for young readers that depict ethnicity in the United States" three times (1983, 1985, 1986). In 1988, Ashabranner and his wife moved to Williamsburg, Virginia.

Ashabranner's wife, Martha, died at age 98 on May 30, 2020.

Published works For children Source:

Other The Stakes Are High (editor), Bantam (New York), 1954. A First Course in College English (textbook, with Judson Milburn and Cecil B. Williams), Houghton (Boston), 1962. A Moment in History: The First Ten Years of the Peace Corps, Doubleday (New York), 1971.