Chris Crowe was born in Danville, Illinois on May 28, many years ago. While he was a child, his father changed jobs often, so Chris and his family lived in various places including Normal and Bloomington, Illinois; Santa Fe and Las Cruces, New Mexico; Carmichael and Dublin, California; and finally Tempe, Arizona. They settled in Tempe for several years, long enough for Chris to graduate from McClintock High School.

Chris attended Brigham Young University on a football scholarship. At BYU he majored in English and played in the 1974 Fiesta Bowl. After graduating from BYU, he taught high school English, first at Weber High School in Utah, and later at his alma mater, McClintock High in Tempe, Arizona.

Chris earned a doctorate in English education in 1986 from Arizona State University and started his university career at Himeji Dokkyo University in Japan a year later. He also taught at BYU-Hawaii before accepting his present position in the English department at BYU in Provo, Utah, where he works as a professor of English and director of the English education program.

Mississippi Trial, 1955 is his first young adult novel with Penguin Putnam, and it won several awards, including the 2003 Children's Book Award from the International Reading Association and the Jefferson Cup Award. Getting Away with Murder: The True Story of the Emmett Till Case, a nonfiction companion to that novel, was released by Penguin Putnam in June 2003 and was named a 2003 Best Book of the Year by The School Library Journal. He is also the author of Presenting Mildred D. Taylor, a biography of the famous Newbery medal winning author. In January, 2004, Scarecrow Press published his newest book: More than a Game: Sports Literature for Young Adults. He is currently working on three projects: another young adult novel, a nonfiction account of William Mariner’s adventures in Tonga in the early 1800s, and a biography of Thurgood Marshall. In addition to his books, he has published 11 short stories, 13 chapters in academic books, more than 60 academic articles, and 60 magazine articles.

Chris, a father of four, lives in Provo, Utah, with his wife, Elizabeth. Two of his children are university students, one is on a church mission in Chile, and one is working. Chris’s first grandchild, Ella Ruth Hughes, was born in August 2003.

For more information, please visit his website at www.chriscrowe.com.

Chris Crowe will appear on Thursday, Oct. 19, at 7 pm at the Delta City Library.