Christopher Paul Curtis has worked on a car assembly line. He has unloaded trucks at a warehouse.
Now he sits at a table in the children's section of a Canadian library all day long and does just what he's always wanted to do: write stories.
Curtis's new novel, "Bud, Not Buddy," won this year's Newbery Medal, a prize given by the American Library Association for outstanding children's literature. Chris, as his friends call him, became the first African American writer in more than 20 years to win the Newbery Medal.
He writes slowly, too, by hand. "Until the character comes to me," he explains. "Then the story really explodes."
"Bud, Not Buddy" (published by Delacorte Press) is the story of a 10-year-old motherless boy named Bud – not Buddy – who lives in Flint, Michigan, in 1936. The boy goes looking for his father, whom he believes might be a legendary jazz band leader, and has adventures along the way.
The idea for the book came to Curtis while he was at a family reunion. He heard for the first time that his grandfather had been a band leader in the 1930s, and he began to imagine what life was like back then.
"One of the really fun things about writing is that the author can combine his or her imagination with real facts and things that have happened to other people," he says.
The 46-year-old Curtis was born and grew up in Michigan, and now lives in Canada.
"I wasn't a real book person when I was younger," he says. "I was a great reader, but I wasn't particularly drawn to books. My favorite was probably 'To Kill a Mockingbird.' It's still one of my all-time favorites."
Funny, then, that he became a writer. "I wanted to be an athlete, a doctor, a lawyer," he says, "and there was a serious period of time where I really wanted to be a hermit!"
Eventually, his wife, Kaysandra, a nurse, encouraged him to quit his day job and try to make a living as a writer.
His next book is called "Bucking the Sarge," and "it's the story of a 15-year-old boy from Flint whose mother owns a lot of rental property and group homes. She's also scamming everyone that she can, and she wants to break him in to take over for her once she retires."
The son has other things in mind.
