10/06/2025
Happy Birthday Maya Lin!!!
Happy 66th birthday to acclaimed American architect and artist Maya Lin! As a 21-year-old undergraduate at Yale in 1981, Maya Lin's design was selected for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, beating out 1,441 other competition submissions. Her famous memorial features a black cut-stone masonry wall with the names of 58,300 fallen soldiers etched into its face. The American Institute of Architects has ranked it as number 10 on their list of America's Favorite Architecture. Lin, who continues to work today as an architectural designer and artist, also designed the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama among many other works.
To share her story with children, Maya Lin is the subject of the inspiring picture book, "Maya Lin: Artist-Architect of Light and Lines," for ages 5 to 9 (https://www.amightygirl.com/maya-lin-light-and-lines), the chapter book "She Persisted: Maya Lin" for ages 6 to 9 (https://www.amightygirl.com/she-persisted-maya-lin), and the photo-filled "Maya Lin: Thinking With Her Hands" for ages 10 and up (https://www.amightygirl.com/thinking-with-her-hands)
She is also featured in two compilation books for children: "Little Feminist" for ages 4 to 8 (https://www.amightygirl.com/little-feminist-picture-book) and "Women Artists A to Z" for ages 6 to 10 (https://www.amightygirl.com/women-artists-a-to-z)
To learn about about heroic women who served during the Vietnam War, we also recommend "Courageous Women of the Vietnam War" for teens and adults, ages 13 and up, at https://www.amightygirl.com/courageous-women-of-the-vietnam-war
For fun ways to inspire the architects and builders of tomorrow, we've showcased our favorite girl-empowering building toys in our blog post: “Building Her Dreams: Top 60 Building and Engineering Toys for Mighty Girls," at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=10430