Happy Birthday, Gordon Korman!

Born October 23, 1963. Author of Losing Joe's Place, The Toilet Paper Tigers, The Sixth Grade Nickname Game, Schooled, and many more middle grade and teen novels.

Five Fun Facts: 

• Gordon Korman wrote his first book - This Can't Be Happening at McDonald Hall - when he was 12 years old, and it was published in his native Canada in 1977, when he was fourteen.
• According to his website, Gordon Korman's pet peeves are: "Opera, New York traffic, zucchini sticks, and books where the dog dies."
• In sixth grade, Gordon Korman was known as "the G-Man." 
• Gordon Korman is one of the authors who has contributed to the popular 39 Clues series.
• Gordon Korman's favorite book is The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.

Quotation: If you call somebody Ms. Pterodactyl enough times in your mind, eventually it comes out your mouth.That was how the Pterodactyl Period began exactly eight minutes into the first day of Ms. Terranova's Poetry class. Jeremy was trying to say, "Ms. Terranova, I don't belong in this class." But it came out, "Ms. Pterodactyl --" That was all it took. The other students howled with laughter. By the end of the day, the whole school knew about it, and Ms. Terranova couldn't take three steps without hearing someone from behind a door, yelling, "Heads up! It's a pterodactyl!" It was written in Magic Marker on her classroom door. Someone slipped a small box of reptile food from the local pet shop into her mailbox in the office. And at four o'clock, when she headed to the parking lot after a harrowing day, there it was, written in the dirt on the side of her car: PTERODACTYL-MOBILE. It was amazing how many sixth graders knew how to spell pterodactyl. (from The D- Poems of Jeremy Bloom)

Katie Says: Gordon Korman has always been one of my favorite authors. I met him when he visited my middle school during my eighth grade year and again as an adult, at BEA, when Pop had just been published. As a kid, I read The D- Poems of Jeremy Bloom over and over again when I couldn't sleep, not because it put me to sleep, but because its sense of humor  took my mind off of whatever was keeping me awake. I still remember my seventh grade English teacher reading Losing Joe's Place aloud to us, and I still have the beat-up library book sale copy I bought the following year. I love that he is still writing, and that books like Schooled are so popular with a new generation of kids.

Visit Gordon Korman online at gordonkorman.com.

Sources

• "Gordon Korman." 2010. Books & Authors. Gale. Gale Internal User 9 Oct 2012 <http://bna.galegroup.com/bna/start.do?p=BNA&u=gale>
• Korman, Gordon, and Bernice Korman. The D- Poems of Jeremy Bloom: A Collection of Poems about School, Homework, and Life (sort Of). New York: Scholastic, 1992. Print.
• "Official Gordon Korman Web Site." Official Gordon Korman Web Site. N.p., n.d. Web. 09 Oct. 2012. <http://gordonkorman.com/>.
• "TEACHERS." Gordon Korman: Author Q&A. N.p., n.d. Web. 09 Oct. 2012. <http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/gordon-korman-author-qa>.