Chris Crutcher is one of the most honored young adult novelists, having won the prestigious Margaret A. Edwards Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Young Adult Services Library Association, an award from ALAN (Assembly on Adolescent Literature) for significant contributions to young adult literature, and the Intellectual Freedom Award from the National Council of Teachers of English. Pretty amazing for a self-professed academic underachiever who often tells the story of how he read only one book (To Kill a Mockingbird) cover-to-cover during four years of high school.

Crutcher was born July 17,1946, in Dayton, Ohio, the middle child of parents he claims were just passing through the city.

He told Dave Jenkinson in an interview in Emergency Librarian that they all arrived "before I got dry" in Cascade, Idaho, a small lumber and logging town of less than 1,000 people. His father, John, had been a...