pseudonyms: Stacie Williams Stacie Johnson Walter Dean Myers was born on August 12, 1937 in Martinsburg, West Virginia but moved to Harlem with his foster parents at age three. He was brought up and went to public school there. He attended Stuyvesant High School until the age of seventeen when he joined the army. After serving four years in the army, he worked at various jobs and earned a BA from Empire State College. He wrote full time after 1977. Walter wrote from childhood, first finding success in 1969 when he won the Council on Interracial Books for Children contest, which resulted in the publication of his first book for children, Where Does the Day Go?, by Parent's Magazine Press. He published over seventy books for children and young adults. He received many awards for his work in this field including the Coretta Scott King Award, five times. Two of his books were awarded Newbery Honors. He was awarded the Margaret A. Edwards Award and the Virginia Hamilton Award. For one of his books, Monster, he received the first Michael Printz Award for Young Adult literature awarded by the American Library Association. Monster and Autobiography of My Dead Brother were selected as National Book Award Finalists. In addition to the publication of his books, Walter contributed to educational and literary publications. He visited schools to speak to children, teachers, librarians, and parents. For three years he led a writing workshop for children in a school in Jersey City, New Jersey. Walter Dean Myers was married, had three grown children and lived in Jersey City, New Jersey. He died on July 1, 2014, following a brief illness. He was 76 years old.

Love Jacaranda is out in the world! Hope you'll check out this fun wish-fulfillment romance! Now, bio: I grew up on a street called Salem Court. This probably influenced my interest in witches. When I was five, my mom said I should be an author. And when I was eight, I got my first rejection letter from Highlights Magazine. I learned to read early. But I compensated for this early proficiency by absolutely refusing to read the programmed readers required by the school system—workbooks where you read the story, then answered the questions. When the other kids were on Book 20, I was on Book 1! My teacher, Mrs. Zeiser, told my mother, "Alexandra marches to her own drummer." I don't think that was supposed to be a compliment. My family moved to Miami when I was in middle school. I had a really hard time making friends, so I spent a lot of time reading and writing then. By high school, I'd made some friends and gotten involved in various "gifted and talented" performing arts programs. I studied opera in college (I'm a coloratura—the really loud, high-pitched sopranos.) and then went to law school. It was law school that probably helped with my first novel. Breathing Underwater deals with the serious and all-too-common problem of dating violence. I based the book on my experiences interning with the State Attorney's Office and volunteering with battered women. I thought this was a really important topic, as 27 percent of teenage girls surveyed have been hit by a boyfriend. I'm happy that the book is so popular, and if you are reading this bio because the book was assigned for school, I'm happy about that too. I think I write for young-adults because I never quite got over being one. In my mind, I am still 13-years-old, running laps on the athletic field, wearing this really baggy white gymsuit. I’m continually amazed at the idea that I have a checking account and a mortgage. So I try to write books that gymsuit girl might enjoy. It’s a way of going back to being thirteen . . . knowing what I know now. Right now, I live half a mile away from my old middle school, in Palmetto Bay, a suburb of Miami, with my husband, daughters, dogs, and cats.

Chris Lynch is the Printz Honor Award-winning author of several highly acclaimed young adult novels, including KILL SWITCH, ANGRY YOUNG MAN, and INEXCUSABLE, which was a National Book Award finalist and the recipient of six starred reviews. He is also the author of FREEWILL, GOLD DUST, ICEMAN, GYPSY DAVY, and SHADOWBOXER, all ALA Best Books for Young Adults; EXTREME ELVIN WHITECHURCH, and ALL THE OLD HAUNTS. He holds an M.A. from the writing program at Emerson College. He mentors aspiring writers and continues to work on new literary projects. He lives in Boston and in Scotland.

Ask Ron Koertge what he brings to the realm of young adult fiction, and the seasoned author responds matter-of-factly. "I write dialogue well, and I'm funny," he says—an assessment few would argue with. "I like iconoclasm and practice it in my fiction. I don't like pretense or hypocrisy. I'm almost always irreverent." A faculty member for more than 35 years at Pasadena City College, where he has taught everything from Shakespeare to remedial writing, Ron Koertge is the author of several acclaimed novels, most of them for young adults. That Ron Koertge is a master at capturing teenagers' voices—often in witty repartee—is fully evident in MARGAUX WITH AN X, the story of a sharp-tongued beauty and a quirky, quick-witted loner. "MARGAUX WITH AN X started as a short story, but the heroine wouldn't let me alone," the author says. "She had a story to tell, and she wanted a whole novel to tell it in." Another unlikely pairing is found in STONER & SPAZ, Ron Koertge's funny, in-your-face tale of a young cinephile with cerebral palsy and the stoner who steals his heart. "My wife works with the disabled," the writer says of his inspiration for the novel, which quickly garnered critical acclaim. "One night she came home and told me about a young man she'd been working with. He had C.P. and a terrific sense of humor. Coincidentally, that day I had talked to a former student of mine who'd recently been in rehab for substance abuse. What would happen, I wondered, if those two knew each other?" In addition to his young adult novels, Ron Koertge writes poetry, and has been dubbed "the wisest, most entertaining wiseguy in American poetry" by poet-laureate Billy Collins. SHAKESPEARE BATS CLEANUP is narrated by a straight-talking, fourteen-year-old first baseman who has been benched by mono and decides to take a swing at writing poetry. Written entirely in free verse, with examples of several poetic forms slipped into the mix—including a sonnet, haiku, pastoral, and even a pantoum—SHAKESPEARE BATS CLEANUP is a veritable English teacher's dream. "The interest in SHAKESPEARE BATS CLEANUP is less with the arc of the plot than with the individual poems, some of which demonstrate poetic form, some of which tell the story," the author says. "One of my biggest challenges was to write like a fourteen-year-old who has a knack for writing poetry, and not just sound like a sixty-one-year-old pretending to be one!" The author's first book with Candlewick, THE BRIMSTONE JOURNALS, is also a novel written in free verse, with 15 different teenage characters narrating four or five poems each. "The book started to nag me a few months before the shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado, and I started to make notes in the form of poems," he says of the hauntingly prescient work. "BRIMSTONE needed to move at high velocity, and this form is perfect for that: no tail fins, no leather seats, no moon roof. Just get in and go." Ron Koertge grew up in an agricultural area in an old mining town in Illinois, just across the Mississippi from St. Louis, Missouri. There he learned to "drive a tractor and buck hay bales, which are clearly useful skills in Los Angeles," he quips. He and his wife live in South Pasadena, California.

I grew up in the Midwest, and had no idea I'd become a writer one day. However I gradually felt a need to tell my own stories. To explain, in writing, how I saw the world. Today I'm a full time writer with 13 novels, many short stories, and two movie adaptations. I enjoy visiting schools and libraries, and sharing what I've learned about writing–and just hanging out with teachers and their students. So hit me up with questions on my books, or anything, really. Also, check out the photos of MEMORY BOY: THE OPERA on my website. It was a great adaptation of MEMORY BOY, the novel, which is used in lots and lots of schools!

I was born in the Pacific Northwest, in southwestern Washington State, but we moved around a lot when I was young. My father had migrated from the Oklahoma dustbowl to California in the 1930s, and migration never seemed to leave his blood. Adjusting to new schools, sometimes a few a year, was hard. Reading got me through and became a passion. I gobbled up The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, The Enormous Egg by Oliver Butterworth, The Black Stallion series by Walter Farley, and many others. My love of stories soon became a zeal for "getting things down on paper." At age 11, I started my first novel, The Canadian Calf. I had just finished reading The Yearling, so I figured a novel about a young boy in Canada who adopts an abandoned moose calf would be just the ticket. When my younger brother, Doug, got his smelting pole hung up on an old piling and fell into the frigid, fast-moving floodwaters of the Cowlitz River, I came up with the idea for my second novel, The Swift Stream, which concerned the art of smelt dipping in the Cowlitz using a woman's nylon stocking as a net. I knew from then on that my life's goal was to publish fiction. Through adolescence, college, marriage, and children, I never lost sight of it. Sometimes life can throw curves and wavy lines at us, and I've seen my share, but I've never strayed from writing for long. In fact, armed with visions of authoring the great American novel as an expatriate, in 1981, I moved my family to a small village in the hills of southern Spain. We planned to spend one year and stayed for nearly four. I learned the craft of writing; my wife conquered the language and made fast friends. My daughter was the first foreigner ever picked to be queen of the annual village fair, and my son was soon indistinguishable from the other young boys in the village. One of my most prized memories is of the day my wife Ed and Mary Averett at wedding and I were matron of honor and best man at the wedding of some close friends in the village church. The high walls of the traditional Catholic church were hung with precious oil paintings that had been torn during the Spanish Civil War. And still they hung there. We felt privileged to be a part of such an important occasion. Our experience in that part of the world was life-changing and stays with us to this day. My novels are about how families work through grief and loss, which can occur in many forms. Besides grieving loved ones who have died, one can also grieve over a divorce, friends from an old neighborhood after moving away, a favorite pet who has died or gotten lost, the loss of status in the community, even losing one's place in the world in general. My belief that people can get through these transitions and find a better way of life is what informs and inspires my writing. It is the primary issue in my novel, The Rhyming Season.

TIME magazine has put Code Name Verity on its list of "100 Best YA books of All Time." O.o https://time.com/collection/100-best-...

Tim Wynne-Jones (born 12 August 1948) is an English–Canadian author of children's literature, including picture books and novels for children and young adults, novels for adults, radio dramas, songs for the CBC/Jim Henson production Fraggle Rock, as well as a children's musical and an opera libretto. Awards: Arthur Ellis Award ◊ Best Juvenile (2001): The Boy in the Burning House Edgar Award ◊ Best Young Adult (2002): The Boy in the Burning House

Peter Johnson is a television producer and writer as well as a comic book writer. Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.