While growing up in a large sharecropping family in Missouri during the Depression, Berniece Rabe Tryand practiced telling stories to herself. When she was 40, a teacher at Elgin Community College inspired her to use those storytelling skills to become an author, leading her to write 17 books, several of which won awards.

Ms. Tryand’s 1978 book “The Orphans” (Dutton Juvenile) won the Society of Midland Authors award for best children’s nonfiction. Ms. Tryand, who wrote under the name Berniece Rabe, also was nominated five times for the American Library Association’s Newbery Medal and won the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators’ Golden Kite award, the National Children’s Choice Award and two Best of the Decade awards.

Ms. Tryand met her first husband, Walter Henry Rabe, in Panama during World War II while she was modeling a line of fashions and he was in the Army. They were married in 1946 and organized the first Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints congregation in Elgin. Walter Rabe died in 2005 after a 59-year-marriage, and Ms. Tryand married James Tryand of Plano in 2009.

She is survived by James Tryand; her three sons Alan, Brian and Clay Rabe; her daughter Dara Rabe Sandland; 10 grandchildren, and 14 great-grandchildren.