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Encyclopedia Of Arkansas Mintue: Robbie Branscum

An Arkansas native’s hardscrabble childhood was a key inspiration on her award-winning career as an author for older children.

Robbie Branscum was born Robbie Nell Tilley in Big Flat in 1934 and grew up on her grandparents’ sharecropper farm. She attended a one-room school that had two crates filled with books that allowed her escape from her hard life; she later said “I read like a starving person eats.”

Her mother moved her to Colorado when Tilley was 13 and she married Dwane Branscum two years later, moving to California.

A natural storyteller, Robbie Branscum would publish twenty books between 1971 and 1991. Her books would win several awards, with 1982’s The Murder of Hound Dog Bates taking the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America as well as being one of the New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Her largely autobiographical The Girl won a PEN award for literary excellence in children’s fiction.

Branscum died in 1997, leaving many unfinished manuscripts.

You can read the entire Encyclopedia of Arkansas entry at encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/robbie-tilley-branscum-4190.

Mark Christ produces and hosts Encyclopedia of Arkansas Minute on KUAR. He is head of adult programming for the Central Arkansas Library System. He previously served as community outreach director for the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program, which he joined in 1990 after eight years as a journalist.