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Thirty booksellers will win the opportunity to visit with top New York authors during BookExpo America by entering the first ABFFE Author Auction. The online auction kicked off Wednesday, March 26, at 9:00 a.m. EST on the Web site of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE), www.abffe.com. The auction ends on Friday, March 29, at 3:00 p.m.

On March 20, at a ceremony held at the New York Public Library, author Colson Whitehead was honored with the Young Lions Fiction Award [YLFA] for his novel John Henry Days (Doubleday). Established in 2001, YLFA awards a $10,000 prize to a writer age 35 or younger for a novel or a collection of short stories. Remarkably, this year, all the nominees for YLFA were also Book Sense 76 picks. John Henry Days was a July/August Book Sense 76 pick.

Ruminator Books, the venerable St. Paul bookstore, now with a Minneapolis location as well, was an original participant in the Book Sense program. It also signed on to BookSense.com when that became an option.

"I do everything late in life," said 55-year-old Kurt Corriher, author of the debut thriller Someone to Kill (Forge). "I have my children late in life -- I have a son who’s nine, and a daughter who’s 13 -- and I publish a novel late in life."

George P. Pelecanos, the crime-fiction author whose Hell to Pay (Little, Brown) is a Book Sense 76 pick for March/April, started laying the groundwork for a writing career when he was still a youngster -- although he didn't know it then.

A three-year-old girl falls off a second-floor balcony, lands on her head and breaks her skull. Three days later, she's playing in the snow, fully recovered -- an astounding medical success. But what if this accident had occurred in a remote village in the Indian Himalayas with an American woman doctor performing the surgery for the first time while carefully consulting the medical textbook open in front of her? In this experience, you not only have a chapter from Craig Joseph Danner's self-published novel, Himalayan Dhaba, but also a page from his life.

Virginia Hamilton, an internationally renowned and award-winning author of children’s literature, died February 19, 2002, in Dayton, Ohio. She had been ill with cancer for a number of years. Hamilton was 65.

There are several key dates in the career of children’s author Jack Gantos. In 2001, Gantos received a Newbery Honor for Joey Pigza Loses Control. His novel Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key was a National Book Award Finalist in 1999. In 1976, his first book, Rotten Ralph, was published. And in 1972 he spent a year in prison.

Claude Brown, the author of the classic 1965 semi-autobiographical novel Manchild in the Promised Land (Simon & Schuster), died on February 2. The cause of death was a lung condition. Brown was born in New York City in 1937 and grew up in Harlem. He graduated from Howard University in 1965 and attended law school first at Stanford, then Rutgers. He also wrote a book called The Children of Ham in 1976. He spent much of the following two decades writing magazine articles, lecturing, and teaching.

Accountant Tess Uriza Holthe did not begin the writing class at her favorite bookstore with dreams of completing a novel. At the time, writing was a hobby. However, when Linda Watanabe McFerrin (author of The Hand of Buddha, Coffeehouse Press) -- who was teaching the class "Life into Literature" at Book Passage in Corte Madera, California -- gave her students an assignment to write about a family myth, a treasure chest of memories was unlocked for Holthe.