She was born Eleanor Ann Hubbard. Everyone called her Ellie.

Ellie came into the world on September 6, 1947, and was raised in Rutland, Vermont. Her mother taught elementary school in a one-room schoolhouse, and handed down a love of books before Ellie was old enough to read them herself.

She worked her way through Syracuse University, taking degrees in Childhood Education and Journalism, and paying for them by selling term papers — priced, with some nerve, by the grade the student wanted.

While teaching skiing at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, she met John Ayer. They married, had two sons, Madison and William, and moved to Colorado to start a publishing company of their own.

What followed was a career of some fifty books. Most were young adult non-fiction, and the greater part of those were about the Holocaust — written on the conviction that the thing young readers most need is the truth, told carefully, without being made easier than it was.

She wrote biographies, among them Charles Dickens, Margaret Bourke-White and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She wrote a series of self-help books for teenagers. She wrote travel guidebooks for Colorado, Arizona and California, because she liked the places and thought other people should see them properly.

In 1995, Parallel Journeys — the braided story of Helen Waterford, who survived Auschwitz, and Alfons Heck, who rose through the Hitler Youth — won the Christopher Award and was named an ALA Best Book for Young Adults.

And she kept teaching. She volunteered in schools across Colorado and at her local libraries, and she coached three consecutive teams to the finals of the National Geographic Geography Bee. The Foundation exists because that work should not stop just because she did.