Local Author to Speak as Part of Writing Popular Fiction Graduate Program’s January Residency

Greensburg, PA – Seton Hill University is proud to present "An Evening with Jack Gantos" Tuesday, January 6 at 7 p.m. in Cecilian Hall. Gantos’ lecture will take place during the January residency of the Master of Art in Writing Popular Fiction program. The lecture is free and open to the public, and will be followed by a book signing.

Jack Gantos was born in Mt. Pleasant, Pennsylvania, and still has family in Greensburg. He was in the Bluebird reading group in first grade, which he later found out was for the slow readers. To this day he’d rather be called a Bluebird than a slow reader. His favorite game at that time was playing his clothes were on fire and rolling down a hill to save himself.

When he was seven, his family moved to Barbados. He attended British schools, where there was much emphasis on reading and writing. Students were friendly but fiercely competitive, and the teachers made learning a lot of fun. By fifth grade he had managed to learn 90 percent of what he knows to this very day.

When the family moved to south Florida, he found his new classmates uninterested in their studies, and his teachers spent most of their time disciplining students. Gantos retreated to an abandoned bookmobile (three flat tires and empty of books) parked out behind the sandy ball field, and read for most of the day. His greatest wish in life is to replace trailer parks with bookmobile parks, which he thinks will eliminate most of the targets for tornadoes and educate an entire generation of great kids who now go to schools that are underfunded and substandard.

The seeds for Gantos’ writing career were planted in sixth grade, when he read his sister’s diary and decided he could write better than she could. He begged his mother for a diary and began to collect anecdotes he overheard at school, mostly from standing outside the teachers’ lounge and listening to their lunchtime conversations. Later, he incorporated many of these anecdotes into stories.

In junior high he went to a school that had been converted from a former state prison. He thinks the inmates probably fled for their lives once the students showed up. Again, he spent most of his time reading on his own.

In high school he decided to become a writer. But he would have to wait another three years, until he went to college, before he could actually meet other writers and study with teachers who thought writing amounted to more than just cribbing book reports and composing sympathy notes.

While in college, he and an illustrator friend, Nicole Rubel, began working on picture books. After a series of well-deserved rejections, they published their first book, Rotten Ralph, in 1976. It was a success and the beginning of Gantos’ career as a professional writer. This surprised a great many people who thought he was going to specialize in rehabilitating old bookmobiles into housing for retired librarians.

Gantos continued to write children’s books and began to teach courses in children’s book writing and children’s literature. He developed the master’s degree program in children’s book writing at Emerson College and the Vermont College M.F.A. program for children’s book writers.

Gantos received the Newbery Honor in 2001 for his book Joey Pigza Loses Control and is known nationally for his educational creative writing and literature presentations to students and teachers. He is a frequent conference speaker, university lecturer, and in-service provider.

Seton Hill, chartered in 1918, is a leading coeducational Catholic liberal arts university with more than 30 undergraduate programs and 7 graduate programs, including an MBA. Seton Hill brings the world to its students through its distinguished lecturers and nationally and internationally renowned centers. For more information, please visit www.setonhill.edu or call 1-800-826-6234.

For more information on "An Evening with Jack Gantos," please contact Wendy Lynn, Administrative Assistant for Writing Popular Fiction, at 724-830-4600.