Monday • April 12 • 7 p.m.
Doors open at 6:15 p.m.

First Congregational Church
1126 S.W. Park Ave., Portland

A book sale and author signing
will follow Mr. Peck's talk.

Newbery Award winning author of numerous novels, including:

A Long Way From Chicago
A Year Down Yonder
Fair Weather
The River Between Us
The Ghost Belonged to Me

Tickets: $10 (adults) • $5 (students K-12)

Tickets are on sale March 8-April 11 at Central Library, the Library Administration building, Capitol Hill Library, Gresham Library, Hollywood Library and Midland Library.

Tickets are also available at: A Children's Place, Annie Bloom's Books, Border's Books downtown Portland, Twenty-Third Avenue Books, and Jackson's Books in Salem.

To order tickets by mail or for more information, call 503.988.5402.

Biography
Richard Peck was born in 1934 in Decatur, Illinois. His mother, Virginia, was a dietitian and his father, Wayne, was a merchant who often rode his Harley Davidson to work.

Richard was crazy about cars when he was young and took pride in the fact that he could instantly identify the make and model of all cars on the road. He went to college in Exeter, England and then served a stint in the army. He then became a junior high school teacher. He taught in Illinois and in New York City. Then his real steps into the writing profession began. While still teaching, he wrote a column on the architecture of historic neighborhoods for the New York Times and contributed articles to the Saturday Review of Literature and the Chicago Tribune as well as to other magazines and newspapers. In 1971 he left teaching to become a full-time writer. His first novel was Don't Look and It Won't Hurt.

For many years Richard Peck signed on as a temporary lecturer for around the world cruises. These trips enabled him to travel, to teach and to meet people who sometimes appear in his books. He advises young people who want to become writers to get to know people who don't conform to the group. This is a common theme in many of his novels.

Disliking, or maybe we should say disdaining much of modern technology, Richard Peck does not have a computer. He types his manuscripts on a regular typewriter. For some time, he had his friend Paula Danziger's voice on his answering machine. Because of his anti-technology stance, you'll find information about Mr. Peck and some of his speeches on the Internet put out by others but you won't find his website, for he has none.

Richard Peck's books fall into many genres: horror, mystery, occult, social commentary, historical, and realism. In many of his books he develops a theme in which an individual steps away from the group to achieve independence. Another theme in some of his work is that of a young adult adopting an adult role and responsibilities. He's good at characterization through a minimum of description and even conversation. In the book he considers his best, Father Figure (Puffin, 1996) for instance, Grandmother says very little but she dominates the first half of the book. Speaking of grandmothers, his Grandma Dowdel stands side by side with Blossom Culp as his most memorable characters.

-- From Carol Hurst's Children's Literature Site.

Explore related websites!

• A Random House "Spotlight" on the author
• The University of Southern Mississippi de Grummond Collection of the author's writings
• Information from the Children's Book Council
• The Chicago Historical Society's history of the Chicago World's Fair (the setting of Peck's recent novel Fair Weather)
• Eduscape's guide to A Year Down Yonder