Cynthia Kadohata (born July 2, 1956)is a Japanese American children's writer known best for winning the Newbery Medal in 2005.She won the U.S. National Book Award in 2013 for The Thing About Luck.Kadohata was born in Chicago, Illinois.Her first published short story appeared in The New Yorker in 1986.Weedflower, her second children's book, was published in Spring 2006. It is about the Poston internment camp where her father was imprisoned during World War II. 

Her third children's novel, about the Vietnam War from a war dog's perspective, was published in January 2007 by Atheneum Books for Young Readers.Outside Beauty, another children's novel, was published in 2008. It is about a 13-year-old girl and her three sisters, all fathered by different men and what happens when she and her sisters are separated from each other after their mother gets into an accident.