Students

I write books for young readers and one of the most frequent questions I get is, “Why do you write for kids?” I usually answer, “Because young readers are the most important readers in the world!” I became an avid reader around the age of eight. Each summer, my mom took me to the Athens Regional Library where I signed up for the summer book club. I still remember my favorite book club summer, the summer I read 5o books and got an award! The theme that year was Johnny Appleseed. Our big end-of-the-summer party was held at a theater downtown, one of the few air air conditioned places of my childhood.

Tip: Visit your local library and sign up for the summer book club. Read as many books as you can. You might win a prize and you’ll certainly improve your grades when you go back to school at the end of the summer. If it’s not summer when you read this tip, go to the library anyway. Browse the shelves of the children’s department and ask the librarian for book recommendations. Every day of the year should be a reading day for you. Reading does not have a season.

My favorite book from childhood was THE WIZARD OF OZ. Click here to read more about this famous book. If you haven’t read this book yet, I highly recommend it. You can find it at your local library or here on Google Books.

Here I am in my 6th grade class picture when I attended Winterville Elementary School. My teacher that year was Mrs. Denard. Because I still live in Winterville, I still see some of my classmates from way back then. When I was eleven, my parents built a brand new red brick ranch house on Cherokee Road in Winterville. Since the location of our new home was about halfway between the Gaines School in Athens (where my mother had gone to school) and the Winterville Elementary School in Winterville, the school district officials allowed me to choose which school I’d attend for the remainder of that school year. I visited both schools and thought a lot about where I would go. Finally, I selected Winterville and that made a big difference in my life. Winterville back then was a typical small town where everyone knew everyone else and life was slow and unstressful. I learned to love the place and many years later when I sat down to write the manuscript that would become GONE FROM THESE WOODS, I used Winterville as the model for the small town of Newtonville, where the Sartain family lives.

GONE FROM THESE WOODS COVER ART

The boy on the cover of GONE FROM THESE WOODS is a real boy, Luke Kitson. Luke lives in Canada and posed for the dust jacket art when he was eleven, like Daniel Sartain, the protagonist in GFTW. If you’d like to read more about Luke, including what it was like to pose for the cover art of a book, go here. The cover artist is Blake Morrow, also a Canadian. Blake has done other book covers, photography, and comics. To read more about Blake, visit this page.

If you have questions or comments, send me an email.