The Delaware Division of the Arts Fellowship Awardees for Literature 2026

Deborah Baker grew up in the beautiful colonial town of Oxford, Maryland, where one of her earliest memories was the sound of the river lapping the shore. She feels that writing was a profession that “chose me, because at 3 years old I began to hide in the lower kitchen cabinets … with a stack of books to ‘read.’” Those kitchen cabinets housed writers like Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Louisa May Alcott, and Anna Sewell, along with Carolyn Keene, author of the Nancy Drew mystery series, one of her all-time favorites.

Baker has now come full circle; she received her Division Fellowship on the strength of an excerpt from her young adult novel DNA: Destiny Needs Assistance, the first in a series of “reimagined Nancy Drew-like mysteries” that will feature a similarly gifted young detective heroine. She finds that writing for young adults is “particularly challenging and rewarding, as the vernacular…