“Well, I obviously should have been writing YA all along.”

Nervous, truly awe-struck.

The first book he remembered was Ezra Jack Keats’s The Snowy Day Board Book. He was struck by the gorgeous isolation. His first creative writing teacher handed him a Native American volume. He had never read a book by another Native American before. “I knew right then at that moment when I read that line that I wanted to be a writer. And it’s been a gorgeous and magic and terrifying twenty years since then. And now I stand before you grateful.”

He thanked his editor Jennifer Brown, “even though I could be an arrogant bastard.”