Born in Milwaukee, WI in the year of the Cock, 1981 . . . how very fitting. Ken Brosky has lived in the Brew City all of his life and grew up with two parents and one younger sister. Most of his early childhood was spent reading, drawing, and writing small comic books, which were sold to family members at outrageous prices. Things were going well, until one day Ken discovered an insert in his favorite magazine. It looked like a comic book, but when he opened it up, there was nothing but page after page of words. Sentences. Paragraphs. Every once in awhile, a page would be devoted to a single picture of a man standing in snow, usually carrying a shotgun or a chainsaw, tearing through a handful of zombies. Ken read the short story/comic book, and was intrigued by the layout. Here was--essentially--a book printed in the form of a comic, with a few pictures peppered throughout. It was ingenious. And so Ken tried to write his own . . . Two months later, at the end of the sixth grade, Ken Brosky had written his first novel. 308 pages, tentatively titled Somewhere in the Dark. Sure, it was a piece of shit. Sure, the rewrite (done in the eighth grade) was a piece of shit, too. But from that point on, Ken Brosky wanted nothing more than to be a writer. And he has been writing ever since.

Honorable mention, the Tofte/Wright Children's Literature Award.