Like his character, Antsy Bonano, Neal Shusterman was born in Brooklyn, New York. As a boy, Shusterman wanted to be many different things when he grew up, including an actor, artist, doctor, writer, architect, and a film director. In ninth grade, however, he discovered that writing was his “driving passion” when he took the challenge from his English teacher to write her a story each month. Shusterman declares that “by the end of ninth grade, I really began to feel like a writer” (“About Neal Shusterman.” Neal Shusterman). Shusterman went on to become a best-selling and award-winning author. In addition to being a novelist, Shusterman also writes for screen, stage, and television—he has written for the television series Goosebumps and Animorphs, and, under the pseudonym Easton Royce, provided several stories for The X-Files.

Shusterman may be most widely known for his young adult science fiction and fantasy novels, including the Arc of a Scythe and the Skinjacker series, but he is equally adept at contemporary, realistic fiction including Challenger Deep (2015), a teenage boy’s personal account of mental illness, which won the 2015 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. In any