Two-time Newbery Honor book winner Bruce Brooks is an author of nonfiction, novels, and stories for both YA and younger readers. Called "an outstandingly perceptive writer," by a critic for Kirkus Reviews, Brooks has blended interests in sports and in nature to create a diverse body of work for readers of a wide range of ages. A graduate of the prestigious University of Iowa writing program, Brooks put his prodigious talents to work in his first novel, The Moves Make the Man, an interracial tale of hoops and hopes, to create an impressive debut; the book won a Newbery Honor and a Boston Globe-Horn Book Award. Since that 1984 novel, Brooks has gone on to pen some thirty books in genres from serious fiction to series fiction, from picture books to detailed accounts of the lives of birds.

In his fiction, Brooks often deals with outsider themes, placing his...