About Ellen Tarry

Ellen Tarry (September 26, 1906 – September 23, 2008) was an African-American journalist and author who served as a minor figure in the Harlem Renaissance.[1] Her Janie Belle (1940) was the first African-American picture book, and her other works include further literature for children and young adults as well as an autobiography.

Tarry was born in Birmingham, Alabama. Although raised in the Congregational Church, she converted to Catholicism in 1922, after years of attending the St Francis de Sales school for girls on the former Belmead plantation property in Virginia. She was taught there by the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament.

She thereafter attended Alabama State Normal School, now Alabama State University, and became a teacher in Birmingham. At the same time, she began writing a column for the local African-American newspaper entitled "Negroes of Note", focusing on racial injustice and racial pride.

In 1929, she moved to New York City in hope of becoming a writer. There she befriended such Harlem Renaissance literary figures as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay and Countee Cullen. She was the first "Negro Scholarship" recipient at the Bank Street College of Education in New York City, where she met and became friends with Margaret Wise Brown and was influenced by the "here and now" theory of picture book composition.