Gary L. Blackwood

Gary L. Blackwood grew up in rural Western Pennsylvania, and attended one of the last surviving one-room schoolhouses in the state. The school’s library consisted of a single small bookcase. Because books were so unavailable, they seemed like treasures. In his early teens he began submitting stories to magazines. At sixteen he got his first encouraging letter from an editor, and at nineteen he sold his first story. Since then he has sold dozens of stories and articles to adult and children’s magazines, published twenty-one novels and nonfiction books for middle readers and young adults, and had half a dozen stage plays produced in regional and university theatres. In addition to writing plays Gary has also taught playwrighting, and has done amateur theater as an actor.

It is, perhaps, his affinity for playwrighting that inspired him to produce two of his best-known juvenile fiction books: The Shakespeare Stealer, Shakespeare's Scribe, and Shakespeare's Spy.

Garry and his wife Jean and daughter Tegan live near Carthage, Missouri.

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