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Spring 2005 Flying Starts: Cecil Castellucci
Andy Warhol had a 15-minute theory; Cecil Castellucci has "a 10-year theory." Not about getting fame, exactly, but about getting a chance.
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Spring 2005 Flying Starts: D.L. Garfinkle
Michael (Storky) Pomerantz, the endearingly nerdy hero of Storky: How I Lost My Nickname and Won the Girl (Putnam), first emerged over two decades ago in an assignment that D.L. (Debbie) Garfinkle wrote for a creative writing class. "We were given seven words that we had to use in a one-page story," recalls Garfinkle, who was taking the class at Pierce College "just for fun" while working a "really boring job at AT&T." She says her teacher loved her description of Storky and asked to keep it to use as a writing sample for other students. "I never got the piece back," she said.
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Spring 2005 Flying Starts: John Green
A few years ago, when freshly minted college grad John Green was contemplating his future, he probably didn't count on being linked in the public imagination with the use of a toothpaste tube to demonstrate the mechanics of a particular type of oral sex.
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Spring 2005 Flying Starts
Teens already rule at the multiplex and the music store. Now, more than ever, they're also showing their clout at the bookstore.
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Fall 2004 Flying Starts: Katherine Hannigan
Ida B talks to trees. But that's not all. They answer her. Yet, somehow, Katherine Hannigan in her debut novel, Ida B... and Her Plans to Maximize Fun, Avoid Disaster, and (Possibly) Save the World (Greenwillow), makes the situation completely plausible. By the second chapter, her heroine is in the family's apple orchard, greeting the trees by name, and readers think nothing of it.
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Fall 2004 Flying Starts: Katy Kelly
Though she just recently penned her first novel, Lucy Rose: Here's the Thing About Me (Delacorte), Katy Kelly is hardly a newcomer to writing. Remarking lightly that she's been a writer "for a million years," she notes that she has been a reporter for People and a feature writer for the Life section of USA Today, and is currently a senior editor at US News & World Report. And she comes from a family of writers: her mother, Marguerite Kelly, is the author of The Mother's Almanac and a syndicated column on family issues, and her father, Tom, wrote for the Washington Daily News.
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Fall 2004 Flying Starts: Chuck Richards
Jungle Gym Jitters (Walker) reveals something new each time readers revisit its extraordinarily crafted drawings. Even its author and illustrator, Chuck Richards, admits forgetting about and then discovering anew some quirky detail he's created among the book's countless contraptions and spine-tingling perspectives. His high-flying artwork chronicles a boy's fear of his father's fantastic, sky-scraping jungle gym.
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Fall 2004 Flying Starts: Anna Dale
For British author Anna Dale, a childhood fascination with witches proved a key ingredient for the imaginative potion that became her first novel, Whispering to Witches (Bloomsbury).
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Fall 2004 Flying Starts: Meg Rosoff
Meg Rosoff wasn't able to celebrate the glowing reviews her first novel received when they started coming in—she had just been diagnosed with breast cancer. "I was in the hospital for my first operation when the book was released and all these flowers started arriving. Half of the cards said, 'Congratulations,' the other half said, 'We're so sorry.' "
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Spring 2004 Flying Starts: Laura MatthewsLaura
The story of how Fish (Delacorte) came to be published is a bit like the miracle at the center of Laura Matthews's debut novel: Tiger saves the Fish, who leaps from a mud puddle in a war-torn, drought-ridden land. The author never identifies the human narrator Tiger by gender, age or physical attributes. Nor does Matthews identify the country in which Tiger's parents act as relief workers. Even the man who, with his donkey, leads Tiger's family across the border to safety as war encroaches on their small village, is known only as the Guide. Although the author keeps the Guide's nationality and the book's setting anonymous, she steeps the novel in such tangible details—the mountainous terrain, a muddy riverbed—that readers always feel as if they know where they are.
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Spring 2004 Flying Starts: Leslie Connor
Sometimes, getting back to basics helps us appreciate what is truly valuable. This type of reality check certainly had an effect on Leslie Connor, inspiring her to write her first picture book, Miss Bridie Chose a Shovel, illustrated by Mary Azarian (Houghton). In the story, Miss Bridie leaves her thatch-roofed cottage in 1856 Ireland and sets sail for America. Of all her prized possessions, Miss Bridie chooses to bring a shovel to her new homeland, for reasons that soon become apparent in a most practical way.
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Spring 2004 Flying Starts: Mary Ann Rodman
Mary Ann Rodman has wanted to be a writer since age three, when she taught herself how to read. However, it never occurred to her to write a story about her own childhood—growing up in the newly integrated South—until she saw the movie Mississippi Burning as an adult. "It surprised me how many people questioned the movie's authenticity. I began to think that maybe I should write about my childhood," remarks Rodman, whose father, like the Gene Hackman character in the film, was an FBI agent sent to Mississippi to investigate hate crimes during the Civil Rights movement.
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Spring 2004 Flying Starts: Ed Briant
One Halloween in the mid-1990s, artist Ed Briant needed a quick costume for his one-and-a-half-year-old daughter. "The only thing I had was cardboard lying around," Briant says, "so I cut it, stuck a bit of colored paper on it, and turned it into a mask."
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Spring 2004 Flying Starts: Blue Balliett
"I'm astounded that other people are interested in my book," says Blue Balliett, author of Chasing Vermeer (Scholastic), an art-world mystery that has won acclaim for its sui generis mix of puzzles and codes, philosophies and enigmas. To say that other people are "interested" is understatement: 10 foreign publishers snapped up rights to Chasing Vermeer before publication, and earlier this month Warner Bros. snagged the film rights.
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Spring 2004 Flying Starts
Five authors and artists who made noteworthy debuts this spring.
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Fall 2003 Flying Starts: Libba Bray
Libba Bray's love of ghost stories, her view of feminism and her fascination with Victorian society's veiled obsession—sex (or more precisely, budding sexuality)—fuel her first novel, A Great and Terrible Beauty (Delacorte). In this tale of 19th-century British teen Gemma Doyle, powerful visions link her to an ancient purgatory-like realm called the Order. At the beginning of the novel, Gemma's mother dies, and the heroine envisions just how it happened—a murder by an otherworldly being.
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Fall 2003 Flying Starts: Stacey Dressen-McQueen
Stacey Dressen-McQueen admits that she wasn't very brave when it first came to mailing out her artwork for people to see. "Just getting the nerve up to send stuff to people is hard," she says. She started sending some of her illustrations to children's publications and publishing houses in the late 1990s.
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Fall 2003 Flying Starts: Clare B. Dunkle
In September 2001, Clare Dunkle, an American living in Germany, had just finished writing her first novel. She thought she'd need an agent to get it published, but she did a little sleuthing on the Internet first. The first site she checked was Henry Holt's, because back in the 1960s the house had published Dunkle's favorite books ever, Lloyd Alexander's Prydain series. Sure enough, Holt accepted unsolicited manuscripts, and although Dunkle—a former librarian—had low expectations, she sent off her manuscript. Six weeks later, editor Reka Simonsen e-mailed her to say she'd like to publish the book; this October, The Hollow Kingdom appeared—with a glowing blurb by none other than Alexander on its jacket.
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Fall 2003 Flying Starts: John Holyfield
After graduating from high school, John Holyfield decided on a graphic design major at Howard University, because it had been drummed into his head for so long that being a graphic artist was the only way he could make money as an artist. While in college, working at an art supply store, he brought in some sketches he had done to show to the other employees at the shop. They were so impressed with his work, they suggested he send it out. As luck would have it, one of the recipients wanted to publish his images as lithographic prints. Holyfield has been painting ever since.
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Fall 2003 Flying Starts: Lisa Yee
"It all came from a two-word joke," Lisa Yee says of her first middle-grade novel, Millicent Min, Girl Genius (Scholastic/Levine). And ever since the book's release, young readers (and reviewers, too) have been enjoying Yee's sense of humor. "I was thinking about the term 'child psychologist' and how funny it was," Yee explains. "Initially I thought I would write a book about a child who was actually a psychologist—and I did that, but it has since evolved into Millicent Min."
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