Virginia Euwer Wolff was born in 1937 in Oregon. After graduating from Smith College, she taught school, reared two children, and attended graduate school in four states before beginning to write for young readers in her mid-forties. Her novels focus on a learning-disabled sixteen-year-old boy (Probably Still Nick Swansen, 1988); twelve-year-old violinist Allegra Leah Shapiro (The Mozart Season, 1991); two sixth-grade softball teams in 1949 (Bat 6, 1998); and an unmarried teen mother, her two children, and their babysitter (Make Lemonade, 1993; True Believer, 2001; and This Full House, 2009).

Wolff has won the National Book Award, the Jane Addams Peace Award and Honor, two Golden Kites, the Michael L. Printz Honor, two Oregon Book Awards, and, most recently, the Phoenix Book Award from the Children's Literature Association.

She has lived in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., but now reads, writes, and plays chamber music in Oregon.