[1] A member of the faculty of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in children's and adult literature, Kurtz is an international advocate for literacy and writing.
One of her middle-grade novels, Jakarta Missing (Greenwillow/HarperCollins), is the fictional story of what it was like to leave East Africa to spend a teenage year in the United States.
Following in her parents' footsteps, Kurtz was admitted to Monmouth College (Illinois) after her junior year of high school and graduated in 1973 as a psychology major.
At the time of graduation ceremonies, she was involved in a crash of a small plane piloted by her father, while visiting her family in Ethiopia.
For her second picture book, Fire on the Mountain (Simon & Schuster), Kurtz began to reach back to the stories of her childhood in Ethiopia.
Fire on the Mountain received a starred review, was a Children's Book of the Month Club selection, and has remained in print for more than twenty years.
[6] Kurtz's first middle-grade novel, The Storyteller's Beads (Harcourt), is an attempt to show what life was like in Ethiopia during the time of "red terror" after her family moved back to the United States.
She has also written picture books about the beauty of Ethiopia, including Water Hole Waiting (Greenwillow/HarperCollins), co-authored by her brother Christopher Kurtz.
When she returned to North Dakota, she was only home a few days before she and her family had to leave their house that was in the first neighborhood to be evacuated during the 1997 Red River flood.
They spent six weeks in Walhalla, North Dakota, during which time Kurtz flew to Atlanta to be part of a presentation at the International Reading Association, speaking about the power of encouraging children to capture their real lives through the rhythms and imagery of poetry, a practice she began at the Carbondale New School and continued during years of Writer in the Schools projects.
A reviewer in the New York Times called it "sweetly funny" and "a moving-day classic, destined to sidestep its boxed-up brethren for the important job of steadying someone's shaky little hands.
He concluded that he had been inspired to catch krill, an important part of the food web, and ended, "Even poor people can help animals."