Jack Gantos

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The Writer's Page: Mapping My Path

How did I end up in the picture-book world? It was all because of Nicole Rubel, the brilliant illustrator of the Rotten Ralph books, among many others. I was a creative writing student at Emerson College, and I was still on parole after an unsuccessful attempt to smuggle a ton...

After the Call: What Would Miss Volker Say?

Gantos with daughter Mabel after his Newbery win. Photo courtesy of Jack Gantos. I was very pleased to receive the Newbery Award and Scott O’Dell Award for Dead End in Norvelt. In the book, Miss Volker warned of the corrosive, anti-democratic tactics of fake news and advised ­Norvelters to beware...

(Very Eventually) The Zena Sutherland Lecture

Dear Readers,This particular version of my Zena Sutherland Lecture is a fabrication or, at best, a fabulation. Either way it is entirely false. Yes, I did give the Zena Sutherland Lecture at the Harold Washington Library Center in Chicago on May 1, 2015, but it was not as properly cured...

I Spy: Harriet and I

When I was a boy, I knew I was sneaky, but I didn’t think of myself as a “lowlife sneak” until my mother called me one with such disgust in her voice I actually did feel ashamed.I was babysitting at the next-door neighbor’s house when my mother looked out her...

Two Writers Look at Weird

From:Polly HorvathTo:Jack GantosRoger wants us to answer this: “People — some people — say your books are weird. Do you think your books are weird?”This is what I plan to say.No, I don’t think my books are weird, and it hurts my feelings when people say they are. I was...

Mausoleum Madness, or, Children’s Books Six Feet Under

Some months ago I went to the Boston Public Library’s rare book room to view their display of fine first editions by nineteenth-century American authors. Of course they had lovely examples of Thoreau, Alcott, Dickinson, Emerson, and Whitman, and I slowly took the time to read the helpful notations the...
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