Date of birth: 23 December 1937
Website:

Avi (Wortis) was born in New York City on December 23, 1937. He has master's degrees from the University of Wisconsin and Columbia University. From 1962 to 1970 he was a librarian in the theater collection of the New York Public Library and is presently a humanities librarian at Trenton State College in New Jersey. Avi is divorced from Joan Gabriner, whom he married in 1963, and has two sons, Shaun and Kevin.
Avi's (Pronounced AH-vee) novels for middle-grade children are careful ones and the ones for which he is best-known. With richly recorded and researched details, they require attentive and careful reading to uncover their full meaning and their implications. His are not easy novels. They are tense, are full of excitement, and bring fictionalized history to life in a way that causes it to remain in the memory.
His interest in storytelling and in American history perhaps stems from his own family. Avi is a second-generation American, not all that far removed from his family's Western European origins and traditions. As with many second-generation children, Avi was raised with an undivided bias for the "new" country with all its promise while maintaining a close tie with the "old" country and its colorful and meaningful past. In these families a sense of the past is paramount: a sense of family is a sense of self. That sense is very often transmitted through storytelling.
Avi is a thoughtful speaker in that he will question questions, seeking clarity before answering.
(Adapted from *Jim Rigoski's Between The Covers*)

More Authors

Basil Of Caesarea

An influential 4th century Christian theologian and monastic, and bishop of Caesarea Mazaca in [Cappadocia][1], Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey).


[1]: http://openlibrary.org/subjects/place:cappadocia_%28turkey%29...

P. Scott Corbett

P. Scott Corbett is currently a Learning Partner at Ventura college. Previously he was an Instructor of History at Oxnard College from 1996 to 2009 and he continues to be an adjunct faculty member at California State University, Channel Islands since 2002. His previous appointments include Lectur...

Michel Benoit

Michel Benoît (a nom de plume) is a religious scolar and novelist, borna in 1940 in Madagascar (then a French colony). After obtaining a PhD in Pharmacology, he entered the Benedictine order as an unordained monk at the abbey of Saint Benoît sur Loire (from which he took his pen name), remaini...