Gary D. Schmidt

Gary Schmidt grew up in a small Long Island town called Hicksville. As a child, Schmidt struggled in school and was placed in remedial classes until a teacher took an interest in him and sparked his love of reading. Schmidt received a degree in English from Gordon College in 1979 and earned a PhD in medieval literature from the University of Urbana-Champaign in 1985. He then embarked on a career in teaching and scholarship, focusing on subjects ranging from Old English, children’s literature (especially the works of Katherine Paterson), and New England cultural history. Though he had started experimenting with literature for children to distract himself from his dissertation, Schmidt didn’t start writing children’s and young adult novels in earnest until he was mid-career, in the 1990s. Schmidt received Newbery Honor Awards for Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy in 2005 and for The Wednesday Wars in 2008. He retired from his long career at Calvin University in 2023, hoping to focus on further writing. Schmidt and his late wife, Anne, had six children. Schmidt lost his wife to cancer and mentions that writing about loss has been one way to help him cope with that experience. Today Schmidt lives on a 200-year-old farm near Grand Rapids, Michigan. In his spare time, he enjoys gardening, splitting wood, and collecting first editions of books written by New England authors.