40 Fun Facts About Alan Gratz

Before he turned to writing, what did Refugee author Alan Gratz jokingly say he first dreamed of becoming?

A Jedi master was the original plan, he says, but he could not master the Force. He settled for writing stories and newspaper articles all through middle and high school.

Which food does Alan Gratz compare to breathing air when fans ask what his favorite thing to eat is?

Pizza is so plainly his favorite, he says, that naming it is like naming air as his favorite thing to breathe. His official bio even lists eating it among his pastimes.

Which cartoon character did Alan Gratz build as a sixteen-foot costume, so big it needed a rented van?

Totoro towered over the 2012 DragonCon Masquerade in Atlanta and won Best Cartoon Characters, with Gratz's daughter Jo on stage beside him as Satsuki.

Which real ship, turned away from Cuba in 1939, carries Josef's family in Alan Gratz's novel Refugee?

MS St. Louis is where the whole novel began: Gratz noticed that books, films and even an opera had told its story, but nothing had been written about it for young readers.

In Alan Gratz's Refugee, which instrument does Isabel trade for gasoline so her family's boat can leave Cuba?

Trumpet for fuel is the deal that gets the engine started, and at the end of the novel her great-uncle Guillermo gives her a new one.

In Alan Gratz's spy thriller Projekt 1065, the title is the real code name for which Nazi secret weapon?

A jet plane, the Messerschmitt Me 262, grew out of the project and became the world's first operational jet fighter. Gratz kept the German spelling, with a K, for his title.

In Alan Gratz's Captain America graphic novel, the Ghost Army is a real American unit that fooled the Axis using what?

Inflatable tanks, giant loudspeakers and fake radio transmissions were the tools of a unit staffed by artists, actors and sound engineers.

Alan Gratz calls The League of Seven his favorite of his own books; which real inventor is its evil genius?

Thomas Edison wakes a giant monster in a swamp by experimenting with electricity, a forbidden science in the novel's steampunk America.

In Alan Gratz's Grenade, Hideki is handed two grenades on the day American troops land on which island?

Okinawa is where the Japanese Army pulls Hideki and the other boys out of middle school, telling him one grenade is for an American soldier and the other is for himself.

In Alan Gratz's Ban This Book, where does fourth-grader Amy Anne Ollinger hide her secret library of banned titles?

Her locker library was inspired by a viral internet tale about a schoolgirl doing the same thing, a story later revealed to be a hoax.

Which Tennessee city, home of the 1982 World's Fair, is the hometown of bestselling author Alan Gratz?

Knoxville is where he was born and raised, went to Webb School, and stayed on for both of his university degrees.

Which West Coast city did Tennessee-born author Alan Gratz make his home after years living mostly on the East Coast?

Portland, Oregon is where he lives with his family, and his fandom moved with him: he backs both the Timbers and the Thorns soccer clubs.

Before writing full time, Alan Gratz taught eighth graders which subject, the job he says he would still be doing?

English was his subject; he holds a graduate degree in teaching it, on top of an undergraduate degree specializing in creative writing.

Asked on his website's FAQ for a dream job outside writing novels, which career does Alan Gratz name?

Game show host is the dream, and he adds that he also wishes he could draw comics.

Which Major League Baseball team does Alan Gratz, author of The Brooklyn Nine, list as his favorite?

Los Angeles Dodgers top his list of teams, which also includes the German soccer club St. Pauli. His novel follows one family of fans back to the club's Brooklyn days.

Alan Gratz's Ground Zero pairs a boy inside the World Trade Center on 9/11 with a girl living in which country?

Afghanistan is home to eleven-year-old Reshmina, who stumbles upon a wounded American soldier named Taz when a battle erupts in her village.

In Alan Gratz's Heroes, comic-loving friends Frank and Stanley are touring the battleship USS Utah during which attack?

Pearl Harbor ends the boys' daydreams of creating their own superhero in the mold of Superman and Wonder Woman, and leaves them fighting to make their way home.

Alan Gratz's mystery Something Rotten, set in Denmark, Tennessee, retells which Shakespeare play as a modern murder?

Hamlet supplied both the plot and the detective's name: Gratz liked how practical the prince's friend Horatio was and borrowed him.

Which science-fiction franchise did Alan Gratz write for in 2012, in a novel where cadets hunt each other with sporks?

Star Trek got the Gratz treatment in a Starfleet Academy novel: Cadet Kirk plays along for fun, while Bones McCoy joins in to get closer to a girl.

Alan Gratz's Prisoner B-3087 is based on the true story of which Holocaust survivor, whom Gratz met in New York?

Jack Gruener and his wife took the story to the publisher themselves, and Gratz was halfway through the first draft before the two spent an afternoon together at a Holocaust museum.

In Alan Gratz's Prisoner B-3087, Yanek is a ten-year-old boy in which Polish city when the Nazis invade?

Kraków becomes a ghetto where Yanek's family spends three years crammed into shared apartments, before he is sent to the first of his ten camps.

In Alan Gratz's Projekt 1065, a boy spy inside the Hitler Youth is the son of which neutral country's ambassador?

Ireland stayed neutral in the war, and Gratz learned that its diplomats in Berlin were really working as spies, which gave him a hero who was not a Nazi.

Which character from Josef's storyline in Alan Gratz's Refugee turns up decades later sheltering Mahmoud's family?

His sister Ruthie survives because Josef gives himself up to the Nazis in her place, and as an old woman she takes in the Syrian family in Germany.

On a beach holiday while planning Refugee, what did Alan Gratz find washed ashore that reshaped the whole novel?

An abandoned raft with nobody on board, probably from Cuba, made him ask why he was writing only about refugees of seventy-five years ago.

Alan Gratz's Ban This Book was itself pulled from school libraries in 2024 by a county board in which state?

Florida's Indian River County banned it in a 3–2 vote that overruled the district's own review committee, a twist Gratz called incredibly ironic.

In Alan Gratz's War Games, thirteen-year-old American Evie Harris goes to the 1936 Berlin Olympics to compete in what?

Gymnastics is her ticket to Berlin alongside teammates like Jesse Owens, but she ends up mixed up in a plot to steal Nazi gold.

In Alan Gratz's Fantasy Baseball, which Wizard of Oz character takes the mound as pitcher for the Oz Cyclones?

Dorothy pitches while a flying monkey patrols the outfield and a toad plays shortstop, an idea that began with joke jerseys made for Gratz's daughter.

In Alan Gratz's thriller Code of Honor, football hero Kamran Smith dreams of following his brother to which academy?

West Point is the plan until his older brother Darius appears on national TV accused of terrorism, and Kamran sets out to clear his name.

In Alan Gratz's Samurai Shortstop, 16-year-old Toyo survives a punishing first year at a school in which city?

Tokyo in 1890 is the setting, where Toyo learns to blend bushido, the samurai way of the warrior, with an American sport his father despises.

Alan Gratz's first book, a fifth-grade spoof of Real Men Don't Eat Quiche, said real kids don't eat what?

Spinach got the blame in Real Kids Don't Eat Spinach, and he kept writing stories and newspaper articles right through high school.

What was Alan Gratz thumbing through when a 1915 photo of a kimono-clad pitcher inspired Samurai Shortstop?

A travel guide to Japan pictured a man in a kimono throwing out the first pitch at a tournament, and a dozen or so library books later Gratz had his story.

Which co-host of The View featured Alan Gratz's Ban This Book on daytime television?

Whoopi Goldberg put the censorship story in front of a national TV audience, and it went on to win Connecticut's Nutmeg Book Award in 2020.

In Alan Gratz's Ban This Book, Amy Anne's favorite novel, whose banning starts her fight, is by which author?

E. L. Konigsburg wrote From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Amy Anne's favorite, and every book banned in the story has been challenged somewhere in real life.

Which camp, the tenth Yanek endures in Alan Gratz's Prisoner B-3087, is where American soldiers finally free him?

Dachau comes at the end of a second death march, after Yanek has already survived Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald.

Alan Gratz wrote four episodes of which A&E Network series, with stories set in Kentucky and Seattle?

City Confidential used his scripts in 2004 and 2005, shortly before Samurai Shortstop, the earliest of his published novels, arrived in 2006.

Which Washington Irving story did Alan Gratz adapt for a Tennessee stage company in 2004?

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was one of six plays of his produced by the same company, alongside an adaptation of O. Henry's The Gift of the Magi.

Alan Gratz was a writer in residence at the Columbus, Ohio house of which American humorist?

James Thurber House is one of three places where he has been writer in residence, along with international schools in Japan and Indonesia.

Teen detective Horatio Wilkes, hero of two Alan Gratz mysteries, was first invented as an assignment for what?

A college class on mystery and detective fiction asked students to create a sleuth, and Horatio began as a thirty-something forensic scientist, not a teenager.

Which habit does Alan Gratz credit with curing his writer's block, done chapter by chapter before he writes a word?

Outlining separates deciding what happens from deciding how to tell it, and with the plan finished he can draft a chapter a day.

Alan Gratz's Little League career ended after a wild throw from which position hit a spectator in the bleachers?

Left field is where he misplayed a long drive, then launched the ball over the fence and hit his own little brother while every runner scored.