Dan Wetzel is a New York Times best-selling author who has written more than two dozen sports-related books, including the Epic Athletes series of biographies for children.
As a sports writer, Dan Wetzel has worked as the national columnist for Yahoo Sports and Yahoo.com, covering events around the world, including the NFL, college football, the NBA, NASCAR, MLB, NHL, mixed martial arts, men's and women's World Cups and the Olympics. His columns appear in the sports section of Yahoo.com.
He has appeared repeatedly in the anthology the Best American Sports Writing, been honored more than a dozen times by the Associated Press Sports Editors and is regularly a finalist for "National Sportswriter of the Year" which is awarded by the National Sports Media Association.
At Yahoo! Sports he has been part of major investigative stories on pro and college sports, including scandals at Miami, Ohio State, Connecticut, Oregon, USC, the IOC, FIFA, various sports agencies and with in the NCAA itself. He also specializes in sports crime, including covering high profile cases and trials of Jerry Sandusky, Larry Nassar, Aaron Hernandez and others.
As a screenwriter he cowrote the 2014 movie Life of a King, starring Cuba Gooding, Jr. and Dennis Haysbert. He is an executive producer of the Netflix three-part docu-series Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez about the life, crimes and death of former New England Patriot Aaron Hernandez. It is in conjunction with Blackfin Entertainment and Momentum Content, both in New York. He also appears in the series.
He cohosts a weekly radio show on Yahoo Sports Radio with Pat Forde. He was a fill-in host on The Sports Inferno in Detroit, Michigan on AM 1270. He anchors the twice-weekly Yahoo Sports College Podcast with Pat Forde and Pete Thamel. Wetzel is a native of Norwell, Massachusetts. He can be found at https://sports.yahoo.com/author/dan-wetzel/
Jerry Craft is the New York Times bestselling author and illustrator of the graphic novels New Kid and Class Act. In 2020, New Kid became the only graphic novel in history to win the John Newbery Medal for the most outstanding contribution to children’s literature, and it won the Kirkus Prize for Young Readers’ Literature and the Coretta Scott King Author Award for the most outstanding work by an African American writer. Jerry was born in Harlem and grew up in the Washington Heights section of New York City.
Born and raised in the DC Metro Area, Kosoko Jackson is currently a candidate at Southern New Hampshire’s Mountainview MFA program. He writes YA novels featuring African American queer protagonists and is a sensitivity reader for Big Five Publishers. Some of his favorite authors are Courtney Summers, Jen DeLuca, Adib Khorram, Casey McQuiston, Ian McEwan, Alex London, Andi Christopher, Dhonielle Clayton, Ryan LaSalla, Denise Williams and Natalie Parker.
Professionally, he is a digital media specialist and freelance political journalist. His personal essays and short stories have been featured on Medium, Thought Catalog, The Advocate and some literary magazines.
When not writing novels that champion holistic representation of black queer youth across genres, he can be found obsessing over movies, drinking his (umpteenth) London Fog, sampling odd tea flavors or spending far too much time on Twitter.
His 2021 YA debut, Yesterday is History, is published by SourceBooks Fire, and his adult #ownvoices queer romcom, I’m So (Not) Over You, will come out in 2022 with Berkley Romance.
Visit him at Kosokojackson.com or @kosokojackson on Twitter or Instagram.
Spencer Hall graduated from the University of the Cumberlands in Kentucky in with a BS in English. He moved to Chicago to study improv, but soon realized when it came to being funny, he was better at writing things down than making them up on the spot. When he’s not writing, he can be found running by the lake, occasionally performing stand-up comedy at poorly attended open mic nights, and researching how to become a professional mini-golf player. Kind of Sort of Fine is his first novel. Check him out at https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Spencer-Hall/174414596
Lorna Schultz Nicholson has three sports books being released in the fall of 2021: Amazing Hockey Stories: Alexander Ovechkin (sports non-fiction with Scholastic), Taking the Ice (a hockey middle-grade novel with Scholastic) and When You Least Expect It (a YA rowing novel with Red Deer Press). She has published children’s picture books, middle grade fiction, YA fiction and hockey non-fiction. Her books have been nominated for many different awards and are often on the CCBC’s Best Books for Kids and Teens list.
When Lorna was a kid, she loved to play sports, and she also loved to read, so she feels blessed that she has been able to combine her passions into a career. She can honestly say she loves her job! Her first pair of hockey skates were hand-me-downs from the boy down the street. In the summer she spent hours loosening up her ball glove. Today, she still loves sports. In her spare time, she likes to run, bike, swim, ski, play tennis and hit the golf course. She hates to admit that golf is perplexing to her and she hits the ball all over the place. Lorna also still loves to read, and she loves inspiring children to read.
Lorna lives in Edmonton with her husband (Go Oilers Go) and two dogs, a whiny bichon shih tzu, and a sort-of-naughty puppy she rescued from Mexico. Her website is https://lornaschultznicholson.com/
Brent is a recovering high school literature teacher, army medic and tree planter, who now considers himself to be an in-progress writer. He’s the author of the young adult novel Nothing but Life, the adult novels Boy and Saints, Unexpected, as well as Cut Road, a forthcoming collection of short stories. He has published some stories and won a few awards, too. When not writing, he can be found Daddying and Husbanding super hard, working for the local public library or wandering Hamilton, Ontario looking for stories. For more information, go to www.brentvans.com
Q: You’ve really burst on the scene, given all the awards and acclaim you’ve enjoyed for your work. And they’re hard-hitting books on heavy topics – lots of anguish, tragedy, loss, scars. What draws you to dark, contemporary topics and characters that one might call misfits?
Kenneth Oppel is the bestselling author of numerous books, including Airborn, which won the Governor General's Award for children’s literature and a Michael L. Printz Honor Book Award, and the Silverwing trilogy, which has sold over a million copies worldwide. Some of his other books include The Boundless, Every Hidden Thing and Inkling. The Nest and Half Brother both won the Canadian Library Association’s Book of the Year for Children Award. His latest novels are Bloom and its sequel Hatch. Visit him online at www.kennethoppel.ca, or twitter @kennethoppel.
Q: Your work has been tagged magic realism, thriller, horror and paranormal. Is there a tag this list is missing, and is there a thread that connects your 33 (is 33 correct?) kidlit novels? What is your favored genre descriptor and main interest these days?
Paul is the author of Cub, the brand new The Player, and coauthor with Eric Walters of On the Line coming in March 2022. He has a specialisation in English Literature and an MFA in Creative Writing. He spends a lot of time baking in his Toronto kitchen with his nephew, three dogs (two big labs and one tiny morkie) and a grey parrot with a red tail.
Q: You’ve written two and a half books and I want to know where you’ve been all our lives. What work has claimed you outside of your relatively recent writing career, how long did it take to land your first novel, and how committed are you to the writing path these days?
A: I was hiding away in the family business. Anyone who has worked with family knows, you can quit a job but you can’t quit your family. It’s very The Godfather so once you’re in, you’re in for life. I love my family, but office work, nope.
Arthur Slade was raised on a ranch in the Cypress Hills of Saskatchewan. He is the author of twenty-nine novels for young readers including The Hunchback Assignments, which won the prestigious TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award and Dust, winner of the Governor General’s Award for Children’s Literature. He lives in Saskatoon, Canada. Visit him online at www.arthurslade.com.
Q: Some might peg you as a thriller, fantasy or steampunk writer. But you’ve also written nonfiction (including a biography of former Canadian prime minister John Diefenbaker and the titles Monsterology and Villainology), as well as a historic novel, Megiddo's Shadow. What are you most drawn to and why?
A: In many ways I’m like a sponge. At first, as a young reader, I would just soak up everything I could, naturally gravitating toward reading history, science fiction, fantasy and horror. So when I became an author, it was equally natural to write about the very things I’d been reading about. When I get an idea, there’s a process I go through deciding the best way to tell the story and then I pursue that
An action-filled retelling of the story of Robin Hood as seen through the eyes of his trusted strong right hand, Little John.
When peasant John Little witnesses the Sheriff of Nottingham’s men destroying his village for John’s crime of poaching deer to feed his people, he flees into the tangle of Sherwood Forest with the only other survivor, his young foster daughter Marian. But dangers lurk there, too: the outlaw Robin Hood soon catches them and takes them prisoner.
Robin Hood does not quite match the heroic stories that are already told about him. For all Robin’s dazzling bravado and clever tricks, the reality of his fight against oppression by the Norman nobility is a rough and dirty life in the forest, outlawed and constantly hunted.
As the newly dubbed Little John gets an education in how to fit into Robin’s dangerous band, Marian, too, grows into a force to be reckoned with. Thrust into life in a world of fearless bandits, uncertain allies, and merciless vendettas, Little John and maid Marian earn their place—and build an unshakable friendship with Robin Hood.
Told with earthy historical detail and unforgettable characters, this is a must for any young reader fascinated by knights and fights, kings and peasants, or who wants to delve into the many tales that built the Robin Hood legend.