Michael de Guzman

When I was a kid I memorized stories from pop-up books and went door-to-door selling recitations for a nickel. I found out early that storytelling is a tough way to make a living. I kept doing it anyway. I wasn't any good at anything else. I've done a little bit of everything since, including a twenty year stint writing television movies for ABC, CBS, HBO, NBC and Showtime. One of them, an adaptation of E.L. Konigsburg's, FATHER'S ARCANE DAUGHTER (the movie was called CAROLINE? - it won an Emmy) convinced me that I was writing for the wrong crowd. I discovered that I saw and felt the world most clearly through the heart and mind of the kid inside me. When I turned sixty, I started writing novels for young readers.

When I was growing up I saw injustice and hypocrisy everywhere I looked. I still do. The battle against them goes on. Windmills must be tilted at, or the power of romance and imagination will disappear, and with them the means to our true natures. I believe that imagination is more important than information, that laughter cures most things, that love is more powerful than hate, and that hope trumps despair. These things matter. I write about kids who populate the margins of conventional society, who have something to face in life, who take action on their own behalf, and who are aided along the way by eccentric, marginal adults. A merging of the world we live in and the one inside my head.

I went to Trinity School in New York City and the University of Rhode Island, where I met my wife, to whom, much to my good fortune, I am still married. We live in Seattle, Washington.