[4] Then, as part of the Great Migration, Wilkinson moved to New York, where she worked for a bank and took night classes at Hunter College.
[3][4] She married a military man and had two daughters, Kim and Lori, and spent a brief stint in Alaska when her husband was stationed there.
[1][2][4] These books tell the story of Ludell Wilson, a 12-year-old girl who aspires to be a writer, as she grows up in still-segregated Waycross, Georgia.
[4][7][8] In the sequels, Ludell loses the grandmother who raised her and is forced to leave small-town Georgia—and her boyfriend, Willie—to join her mother in New York.
[1][2][14] Wilkinson worked for many years as a staff writer for the United Methodist Church's Board of Global Ministries, for whom she wrote Under the Baobab Tree: Children of Africa (2000).