Randy Powell (edit name/settings)

Randy Powell has published seven novels for young adults, all by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Many have been translated into other languages and have been selected for ALA Best Books and other national and state best-book lists. All are now in paperback.

His novel Is Kissing a Girl Who Smokes Like Licking an Ashtray? was the winner of the 1992 PEN/West award for Children’s Literature.

Randy is a former faculty member of the MFA in Writing for Children program at Vermont College. He has taught at the Whidbey Island Writers Association MFA program and the BYU Writing for Young Readers Workshop. Randy has given private retreats and presentations at many writing conferences and workshops.

He is a member of ALAN (Assembly on Literature for Adolescents of the NCTE), a group of educators who research and write about issues in YA literature.

A graduate of the University of Washington, Randy lives on Seattle’s Queen Anne Hill with his wife and two teenage sons.

FOR STUDENTS

For you students who have to do a report about Randy Powell, feel free to use the following, or contact Randy directly.

You can also Google him or check out an interview at authors4teens.com

I’ve lived in Seattle all my life — since 1956. I live here now with my wife, Judy, and our two sons, Eli and Drew. I like the outdoors, books, fresh crab and raw oysters, and rain.

As a kid, I was crazy about sports. All sports. When I wasn’t playing the real thing, I was playing some imaginary form of it. I wasn’t a great athlete, just obsessed. I peaked when I was eleven. Our little league football team won the city championship, and the coach gave me the game ball. I lost that ball a few years later. I’m still looking for it.

I had fun reading and writing. When I found a book I liked, I threw myself into it, into the main character’s skin. I’d try to write in the author’s style. Writing was hard work, but what a rush it gave me, coming up with the right phrase, finishing a piece and feeling it click, reading it to the class and getting some laughs.

In high school, in the early 1970s, my hero was Arthur Ashe, the tennis pro. I concentrated on tennis and worked hard at it, but not hard enough. Today it’s still my game of choice, and I still don’t work hard enough.

High school is also where I became serious about writing. I became even more so in college, at the University of Washington. I made two trips to Europe, worked summers in Alaska as a deckhand on a fishing boat, and wrote short stories, novels, and even formula romances.

After college, I got a job teaching at an alternative school for junior high and high school dropouts. I taught for four years and loved it, but finally left because it ate up my writing time.

My breakthrough in writing came when I learned to look inside myself and write about the things I cared and felt deeply about. I guess it was only natural that my first published novel, My Underrated Year, should be about a high school football and tennis player. Yes, there’s a lot of myself in that book, although hardly any of the incidents actually happened. That’s true of my other books as well.