"As I sit at my typewriter, working, there are moments when I feel I cannot write another word," author Paula Fox writes. "When the sheer difficulty of discovering what I mean to say and how to say it is so daunting that I want to stop forever. I stay in my chair, pen in hand, yellow-lined pad on the desk next to the machine, doodling or writing down fragments of sentences, hoping some unifying principle will, like a net, draw them together." Paula Fox, born on April 22nd, spent some of her childhood on a plantation in Cuba, attending a one-room school.  She listened to her grandma's stories of Spain and was inspired.  Her first work work for children was Maurice's Room, published in 1966. Then, in 1973, with the publication of Blowfish Live in the Sea, critics took notice of her books. Her book The Slave Dancer won the Newbery Medal in 1974. One-Eyed Cat was applauded with a Newbery Honor in 1985. "Fox's achievement," wrote Margaret and Michael Rustin in Narratives of Love and Loss: Studies in Modern Children's Fiction (1987), "is to write with magnificent restraint and precision about the interplay of personal and historical, inner growth and outer framework, the process of learning to think about oneself and the world."