On Sale Now: Prisoner B-3087

Survive. At any cost. 

Yanek Gruener is a Jewish boy in 1930s Poland when the Nazis invade. Everything he has and everyone he loves is brutally taken from him. And then Yanek himself is taken prisoner, his arm tattooed with the number B-3087.

Forced from one nightmarish concentration camp to another as World War II rages around him, Yanek encounters evil he could never have imagined--and yet finds surprising glimpses of hope amid the horror.

10 different concentration camps. 10 different encounters with death.

Can Yanek make it through the terror without losing his hope, his will, and, most of all, his identity? 

Based on the astonishing true story of one extraordinary boy.

Scholastic Books | March 2013 | Ages 10 and Up

Available in hardcover and ebook

"A bone-chilling tale not to be ignored by the universe."

Kirkus Reviews

"Heartbreaking, gripping, raw, and emotional...storytelling at its finest."

VOYA

"Through Gratz’s spare, persistent prose, the story of the boy’s early life unfolds with the urgency and directness necessary for survivor stories. A powerful story, well told."

School Library Journal

"Gratz ably conveys Yanek’s incredulity, fatalism, yearning, and determination in the face of the unimaginable."

Publishers Weekly 

"A good starting point for students unfamiliar with the Holocaust. Pair it with Doreen Rappaport’s Beyond Courage (2012) and Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl."

Booklist 

YALSA's 2014 Best Fiction for YA Nominee

2014-2015 Nebraska Golden Sower Award Nominee

2013-2014 Georgia Tome Society It List

Spring 2013 Parents' Choice Awards - Recommended Seal

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Starfleet Academy: The Assassination Game

TAG - You're It. 

The rules are simple: Draw a target. Track him down and “kill” him with a spork. Take your victim’s target for your own. Oh, and make sure the player with your name doesn’t get to you first. No safe zones. No time-outs. The game ends when only one player remains.

James T. Kirk is playing for fun. Leonard “Bones” McCoy is playing to get closer to a girl. But when a series of terrorist attacks rock the usually placid Starfleet Academy campus, it becomes clear that somebody is playing the game for real. Is it one of the visiting Varkolak, on Earth to attend an intergalactic medical conference? Or could it be a member of a super-secret society at the Academy dedicated to taking care of threats to the Federation, no matter what rules they have to break to do it?

Find out in The Assassination Game by Alan Gratz, the fourth installment in Simon Spotlight’s exciting series for teens.

Simon Spotlight | June 2012 | Ages 12 and Up

Available in hardcover, paperback, and ebook

Read the first chapter

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Fantasy Baseball

 
You've never played
fantasy baseball like this before. 

A flying monkey in the outfield. A toad at short. Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz on the mound. Alex Metcalf thinks he’s dreaming, but the Oz Cyclones exist here in Ever After, where storybook characters live on as long as kids in the real world believe in them.

But Alex isn't a storybook. To get home, he and the Cyclones will have to win the Ever After Baseball Tournament and earn wishes from the Wizard of Oz. Trouble is, the Big Bad Wolf wants a wish too.

To win the tournament, Alex and the Cyclones will have to defeat the wolf, play the best baseball of their lives, and find the courage to believe in themselves. But what good is believing in yourself if the real world stops believing in you?

Dial Books | March 2011 | Ages 8 to 12

Available in hardcover, paperback, and ebook

"Chock-full of whimsical references to children’s literature, the plot builds rapidly with mile-a-minute action and well-drawn sports scenes."

Marilyn Taniguchi, School Library Journal 

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The Brooklyn Nine

 One family, nine generations.
One city, nine innings of baseball.

"Gratz builds this novel upon a clever enough conceit—nine stories (or innings), each following the successive generations in a single family, linked by baseball and Brooklyn—and executes it with polish and precision."

Ian Chipman, Booklist (Starred Review)

"With an impressively cohesive mix of sports, historical fiction, and family history, Gratz has crafted a wonderful baseball book that is more than the sum of its parts."

The Horn Book

"The fictional voice is sure and engaging, polished without being slick—an entertaining and compelling look at the deep roots of our national pastime."

Kirkus Reviews

Learn more about The Brooklyn Nine

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Virtual Author Visits

Nothing beats an in-person visit with an actual author, but if your school budget has been slashed or if you just want Alan to work with one class then a virtual visit might be the best option for you. With free software from Skype, a webcam and microphone, and a computer that connects to the Internet and displays on a large screen, we can beam Alan's image into your classroom for a live chat with your students. 

What is Skype?

Visit http://www.skype.com/ for all the details and to download the free software. In a nutshell, Skype allows us to turn our computers into videophones so we can chat "face-to-face"--just like the Jetsons! The software is free and the signal goes over the Internet, so it doesn't tie up a phone line and doesn't cost anything. 

What do I need?
A computer with a webcam and microphone. Most laptops have this built in nowadays, but if yours doesn't have one you can buy a webcam/microphone that connects to any computer with a USB.

An Internet connection (preferably high speed).

Free Skype software installed on your computer.

And it's not necessary, but if you can connect your computer so that it projects onto a large screen, it makes the chat more accessible to a full classroom of kids. 

How do I get Skype on my computer?
Go to http://www.skype.com/ and click where it says "download." Choose Mac or Windows. Follow all the prompts to install the software on your computer. Easy peasy. 

How do I know it will work?
We'll set up a time to test the transmission before the day of your scheduled chat to make sure everything is running smoothly. Alan will also call in a little bit early for your chat to make sure that you have a good connection. 

How do we run the visit?
Alan prefers to take advantage of the interactive nature of the technology by running these visits as informal question and answer sessions--no prepared talk. It's best if the students have read one of his books before the chat and come prepared to ask questions. Students can come up to the webcam (so Alan can see them) one at a time to ask their question, and everyone can see and hear his response on the larger screen. It saves a little time if you can determine the order kids will go in before the chat, so we don't lose time choosing kids and having them come up to the computer. 

Want to see it in action?
Click here to see a video of Alan meeting via Skype with a class in Japan. 

Cost
$100 for a class period. 

Contact
E-mail Alan or Alan's assistant Archie to discuss an author visit. 

View Alan's upcoming events calendar
Read a Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators guide to preparing for an author visit (PDF)

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School Visits

Invite author Alan Gratz to your school and your students will learn where he gets his ideas, how he outlines and writes his novels, and how as a Little Leaguer he hit his little brother in the stands with a baseball--from the outfield. 

Since the debut of Samurai Shortstop in 2006, Alan has visited hundreds of schools and libraries all over the United States--and one school in Japan!--to talk about his books, the writing process, and more. As a former eighth grade and tenth grade English teacher, he knows how to keep things relevant and entertaining, and, perhaps more importantly, how to out-smart-aleck the smart alecks.

Put Him to Work
School visits may include any combination of the following sessions:

Rounding the Bases
Using examples from all his books and baseball (what else?) as an analogy, Alan explains how his books are made--from inspiration (first base) to outline (second base) to writing (third base) to revision (home).

Recommended audience: grades 3-12
Works well for: small (classroom-sized) or large (auditorium-sized) groups
Requirements: PowerPoint projector and screen

Stealing Shakespeare
Alan stole plots and characters from Hamlet and Macbeth to write his YA murder mysteries Something Rotten and Something Wicked, but Shakespeare himself was an accomplished literary thief. In this talk, Alan discusses Shakespeare's influences and the Bard's impact on generations of later writers.

Recommended audience: grades 8-12
Works well for: small (classroom-sized) or large (auditorium-sized) groups
Requirements: PowerPoint projector and screen

Ten Things Parents and Educators Do to Discourage Reading
Every year, one of the usual suspects is held up as the thing that killed reading: video games, the Internet, mp3 players, television, movies, cell phones and PDAs. But if we're going to compare novels up to these other media, we have to start treating books like the other media, not like scholarly tomes or educational means-to-ends. In this eye-opening talk, Alan discusses ten things parents and educators do--all with the best of intentions!--that discourage kids from picking up books and reading for fun.

Recommended audience: Parent and teacher groups
Works well for: small (classroom-sized) or large (auditorium-sized) groups
Requirements: PowerPoint projector and screen

Q & A
Alan leaves time for questions at the end of every session, but some of his best visits have included entire sessions set aside just for Q & A. No PowerPoint, no prepared speech, just Alan in the front of the room answering every question your kids throw at him--what it's like to have a career as an author, how to get published, where he gets his ideas, the nuts and bolts of the writing process,  how he tackles research, and what kind of chances the Tennessee Volunteers have this season. Q&A sessions work best classes that have read at least one of his books and prepared questions ahead of time.

Recommended audience: grades 4-12
Works well for: small (classroom-sized) groups

Presentation Limits
There are no limits! Alan will do as many presentations as you can pack into a school day. Put him to work during lunch too! He loves having an informal pizza lunch with smaller groups of kids--the baseball team, the creative writing club, the newspaper staff, etc. Once he's at your school, Alan wants to meet as many kids as he can! If you're planning to sell books during the event, don't forget to schedule time for a signing too, before the students have to leave for their buses.

Alan's Needs Are Few

Give him a couple bottles of water, a computer hookup for a PowerPoint presentation, and (in auditoriums) a microphone--and he's good to go. If you buy him a plain cheese pizza or French fries for lunch, he'll be your best friend forever.

How to Prepare for the Big Day
School visits work best when the students are familiar with Alan and his work. It just makes sense--when they know the books, they're excited to meet the author. You can download reader guides for most of Alan's books.

Samurai Shortstop Reader Guide
Something Rotten Reader Guide
Something Wicked Reader Guide
The Brooklyn Nine Reader Guide

In addition to reading his books in the classroom, teachers can work with students before the visit to help them come up with questions beyond "How much do you make?" "How old are you?" and "How much do you weigh?" Alan's been asked all those questions and more, and he's happy to answer them (even the ones about how much he makes and how much he weighs) but with a little advance preparation kids will often ask surprising and interesting questions about his research and the writing process, and make the visit far more educational and memorable.

You'll Need Books, Right?

You can arrange pre-event sales of Alan's books through a local bookstore, or you can buy the books yourself directly from Penguin. You'll get a 40% discount off the retail price of the books--so you can either pass that discount on to the kids or sell them at full price and use it as a fundraising opportunity. Click here to read more on ordering books from Penguin, and click here for a printable list of Alan's books with all the info you'll need to place an order.

Cost

$1,000 per day plus travel and hotel.

If that's beyond your school's budget there are a couple of ways to make a visit more affordable. You can partner up with another school (or schools) in your area, booking back-to-back events and sharing the travel expenses. If you and other schools can join forces and schedule Alan for five consecutive days, he'll pay his own travel costs. Each school will only pay for one day's honorarium and one night's lodging.

You can also split a day between two schools if they're close enough together so that getting from one school to another doesn't eat into too much of the day.

This blog post by fellow North Carolina author Adrienne Bashista has a great list of grant resources for funding author visits. Some of them are specifically for NC schools, but most of the list is applicable to schools anywhere in the US.

Alan is also available for online chats via Skype for $100 per hour. Click here to see Alan Skype chat with a class in Japan! And click here for more details about planning a virtual visit.

E-mail Alan to discuss an author visit.
View Alan's upcoming events calendar
Read a Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators guide to preparing for an author visit (PDF)

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Media Kit

Click on the resolution link you'd like. Then PC users right-click, Mac users control-click, and "Save Picture As..." to download images.

Author Photos
  

Photo by Wes Stitt

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*Please add "Photo by Wes Stitt" credit.

Cover Scans

Samurai Shortstop
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Something Rotten
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Something Wicked
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The Brooklyn Nine
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Fantasy Baseball
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Prisoner B-3087
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All images may be used for promotional purposes without prior permission.


Video blogs
 
I Should Be Writing 

Skype chat with American School in Japan

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