Walter Dean Myers
pseudonyms:
Stacie Williams
Stacie Johnson
Walter Dean Myers was born on August 12, 1937 in Martinsburg, West Virginia but moved to Harlem with his foster parents at age three. He was brought up and went to public school there. He attended Stuyvesant High School until the age of seventeen when he joined the army.
After serving four years in the army, he worked at various jobs and earned a BA from Empire State College. He wrote full time after 1977.
Walter wrote from childhood, first finding success in 1969 when he won the Council on Interracial Books for Children contest, which resulted in the publication of his first book for children, Where Does the Day Go?, by Parent's Magazine Press. He published over seventy books for children and young adults. He received many awards for his work in this field including the Coretta Scott King Award, five times. Two of his books were awarded Newbery Honors. He was awarded the Margaret A. Edwards Award and the Virginia Hamilton Award. For one of his books, Monster, he received the first Michael Printz Award for Young Adult literature awarded by the American Library Association. Monster and Autobiography of My Dead Brother were selected as National Book Award Finalists.
In addition to the publication of his books, Walter contributed to educational and literary publications. He visited schools to speak to children, teachers, librarians, and parents. For three years he led a writing workshop for children in a school in Jersey City, New Jersey.
Walter Dean Myers was married, had three grown children and lived in Jersey City, New Jersey. He died on July 1, 2014, following a brief illness. He was 76 years old.
“I'm not out here looking for no garbage cans to curl up in. I'm looking for the same good dreams everybody else is hoping for, but I don't see where they are. Or maybe I see where they are, but I don't see how to get there.”
“If I'm going to be pushed off the sidewalk, I might as well step on off. You know what I mean? Stop pretending something good was waiting around the corner and be what everybody expected me to be, which was another throwaway dude. —Lil J”
“That's the thing people can't see when they're explaining to your butt what's going on and how you messing up. They can't see that you knew it long before they did.”
“People want to look at you and see your whole future laid out the way they know it, and I was saying that didn't happen. People aren't born with I'M GREAT! flashing on their foreheads.”
“I know I'm tired of thinking about what I should have done yesterday. I know I'm just tired. If I knew what to do with my life, how to fix it up, I would have done it a long time ago. You can't dig that? You think I want to live like I'm somebody's throwaway?”
“Looks to me like you've been making garbage for a while and dragging it with you. Now you need to get out of here, and that garbage is weighing you down.”
“I think that if we can't go back, then we should try even harder to go forward. And I do want to go forward, to a place where loving someone because they have a gentle smile and a friendly hello is as easy as it once was.”
“I just wanted to be a human being. I just wanted to be whoever I saw in the mirror, without a race or a place in life. What is so wrong with that?”
“But now, like a fallen sparrowOn a golden chain,I'm forever bound in shadow,A prisoner to my pain.”
“Sometimes I feel like I have walked into the middle of a movie. Maybe I can make my own movie. The film will be the story of my life. No, not my life, but of this experience. I'll call it what the lady who is the prosecutor called me. MONSTER.”
“Many teens will see themselves in Myers' account".”
“How deep is your game?”
“She is a moron and too dumb to menstruate straight.--perhaps the best line from Shooter”
“That's what's wrong with women. They want you to wait for them until they get ready and then they don't even tell you how they feel. ”
“Cutting people out of your life is easy, keeping them in is hard.”
“Sometimes when things get hard, we tend to set our sights on what's hard, that difficult thing that keeps us upset, and we turn our back on our strengths. ”
“It's a hard life sometimes and the biggest temptation is to let how hard it is be an excuse to weaken”