Debbie Levy (www.debbielevybooks.com) is an award-winning author of many nonfiction and fiction books for young people, including New York Times best-selling I Dissent: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Makes Her Mark , winner of the 2017 Sydney Taylor Book Award and 2016 National Jewish Book Award; Soldier Song , a 2018 Bank Street College Best Book and 2017 Publishers Weekly Best Book; and We Shall Overcome: The Story of a Song , a 2014 Jane Addams Award Honor Book and Bank Street College Best Book. A former newspaper editor and lawyer, Debbie is a graduate of the University of Virginia and University of Michigan Law School. An article Debbie wrote for the Washington Post about how her mother, Jutta Salzberg, fled Nazi Germany led to a reunion between Jutta and six of her former classmates from the Jewish School for Girls in Hamburg, Germany. Jutta brought her poesiealbum , which inspired Debbie to write this book. Debbie wrote The Year of Goodbyes in consultation with her mother to reflect Jutta's voice, feelings, and thoughts as a girl living through her last year in a community in turmoil. Debbie lives in Maryland with her husband.

They have two grown sons. Jutta died in 2013, just before her eighty-seventh birthday.