There are several key dates in the career of children’s author Jack Gantos.

In 2001, Gantos received a Newbery Honor for Joey Pigza Loses Control.

His novel Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key was a National Book Award Finalist in 1999.

In 1976, his first book, Rotten Ralph, was published.

And in 1972 he spent a year in prison.

Accountant Tess Uriza Holthe did not begin the writing class at her favorite bookstore with dreams of completing a novel. At the time, writing was a hobby. However, when Linda Watanabe McFerrin (author of The Hand of Buddha, Coffeehouse Press) -- who was teaching the class "Life into Literature" at Book Passage in Corte Madera, California -- gave her students an assignment to write about a family myth, a treasure chest of memories was unlocked for Holthe.

Claude Brown, the author of the classic 1965 semi-autobiographical novel Manchild in the Promised Land (Simon & Schuster), died on February 2. The cause of death was a lung condition.

Brown was born in New York City in 1937 and grew up in Harlem. He graduated from Howard University in 1965 and attended law school first at Stanford, then Rutgers. He also wrote a book called The Children of Ham in 1976. He spent much of the following two decades writing magazine articles, lecturing, and teaching.

Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood (Random House) -- a vivid and often heartbreaking memoir by a daughter of white farmers who moved from Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to Malawi to Zambia -- has been drawing the sort of praise from reviewers and booksellers that first-time authors dream of.

A brilliant young lawyer practices in a small town in the Deep South; respected and beloved, he's elected to the state legislature. He continues practicing law while serving in the House of Representatives for years until a case about rape and revenge changes his life forever.

Mark Kurlansky has become a veritable regular on the Book Sense 76 List. The hardcover edition of his The Basque History of the World (Walker) appeared on the November/December list in 1999; the hardcover edition of The White Man in the Tree: And Other Stories (Washington Square Press) was on the January/February 2001 list; and The Basque History of the World paperback (Penguin) was featured on the March/April Book Sense 76 in 2001.

Ernest Hebert, novelist and Dartmouth professor of writing, has taken to the open road for a book tour with stops at about 15 Book Sense stores. His work of historical fiction, The Old American (Hardscrabble, University Press of New England), set in the New England frontier during the French and Indian Wars, is based on the true story of an English settler kidnapped by an Algonkian king, Caucus-Meteor.

"Like son, like father," Alabama Booksmith owner Jake Reiss III describes his foray into bookselling to BTW. His son Jake IV sold books door-to-door; son Frank became manager of Acorn Books in San Francisco then moved to Atlanta and opened the still thriving A Capella Books in the late '80s. Jake's brother Norman also sold books, at Malone's Bookstore in Tuscaloosa.

Karl Kilian, owner of Brazos Bookstore in Houston, is determined to try to put his city and his store on the literary map. "[The University of] Houston has this very good writing program … and it's made serious inroads to the consciousness of the city. But we still don't figure in nationally," he told BTW. "When times were better, [Brazos] bookstore itself could hold events ... but we're off the map in terms of author tours."