The Trouble in Me (Farrar 2015) is, in part, an answer to the question “How does one go bad?” It’s something I’ve been asked often since the publication of Hole in My Life (Farrar 2002), which features my drug smuggling and life in prison.Guest Blogger: Jack Gantos
The Trouble in Me (Farrar 2015) is, in part, an answer to the question “How does one go bad?” It’s something I’ve been asked often since the publication of Hole in My Life (Farrar 2002), which features my drug smuggling and life in prison.
I remember sitting in my sixth grade class at Marian Anderson Elementary in Compton, California, when February rolled around and my teacher, Mr. Johnson, hung up the faces of Black History Month around the room. Sojourner Truth, Rosa Parks, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. surrounded us until early March. Each picture had information about the person depicted on the back of the image, and the pictures hadn’t changed since first grade. With no new countenances added each year, it was as if once black Americans had achieved equal rights in the law books, our history was complete.
When I’m asked how I came to illustrate Patricia Hruby Powell’s Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker (Chronicle Books 2014), my most direct answer is that my agent Steven Malk shared the manuscript with me, after being approached by editors at Chronicle. The more magical response would be that Josephine Baker’s life was an inspiration to me long before I read Powell’s text. 
I first wrote about Abraham Lincoln ages ago. My book, Lincoln: A Photobiography (Clarion, 1987), was researched during the 1980s, and in 1988, it won the Newbery Medal—the first nonfiction book to receive that award in more than 30 years.