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Baseball novelist John H. Ritter (born 1951) grew up playing "one-on-one" hardball with his brothers in the rural hills of eastern San Diego County along the Mexican border. His father was a sports writer in Ashtabula, Ohio, who moved the family out west to become Sports Editor for The San Diego Union. John's mother died of breast cancer when he was only four, but he remembers that she sang to her four children constantly, even making up a song for each of them that fit their personalities.

During high school, John was inspired by Bob Dylan, the songwriter, and spent time memorizing The Bob Dylan Songbook, as well as writing his own songs. After high school, he attended the University of California at San Diego, where he played baseball and met his wife, Cheryl.

For the next 25 years, John became a custom painting contractor, but he always set time aside to write. Then in 1994, the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators honored him with the Judy Blume Award and a cash grant. Three years later, he retired from painting, and in 1999 his first novel, Choosing Up Sides (Penguin Putnam), won the International Reading Association's Children's Book Award.

A full-time writer of Blackfoot Indian, German, and Irish descent, John and his wife now live on the Hawaiian island of Kauai.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "John H. Ritter", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0