John Byran Gantos, Jr., better known as Jack Gantos is an American author of children's books renowned for his fictional character Joey Pigza, a boy with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder . Gantos has won several literary awards, including the Newbery Honor, the Printz Honor, and the Sibert Honor from the American Library Association, and he has been a finalist for the National Book Award. His latest book, Dead End in Norvelt won the 2012 Newbery Medal. Gantos was born in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh to construction superintendent John Gantos and banker Elizabeth ... Gantos. The seeds for Gantos's writing career were planted in sixth grade, about age twelve, when he read his sister's diary and decided he could write better than she could. Raised in South Florida and the Caribbean, he began collecting anecdotes in grade school and later gathered them into stories. Gantos was born in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania and his family moved around the United States until Gantos was a junior in high school, when his family moved from their home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida to San Juan, Puerto Rico.
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