Fifth Grade
Worksheets
Gennifer Choldenko: Billboard For a Book
Where do authors get the titles for their novels? Gennifer Choldenko explains that a title attracts a reader to the book at first. She says that the title acts like a billboard for the book. When the book has been read, the title is thought about in a different way. Gennifer believes that a really good title has a twist to it. She should know, with titles such as Al Capone Does My Shirts and A Tree Falls at Lunch Period.
Gennifer Choldenko was born on October 20, 1957. She was born in California and still lives there today. She was the youngest of four children. This earned her nicknames like "Snot-Nose" and "Short Stuff." She describes her family as loud. Strangers would often ask if her parents were deaf. They were not deaf. The family was just loud.
Gennifer did not have a good relationship with her mother as she was growing up. She describes her mother as someone that did not care at all about what others thought about anything.
Gennifer's dad was a businessman and a writer. He was a generous and caring man. She describes him as her strongest influence to become a writer and to not become a writer. Her father's passion was writing. He wrote every day. He tried very hard to get his work published but did not have any luck. Gennifer says that she learned two things from her dad about writing. "One was that writing was a blast, and two was it would break your heart." Gennifer's dad died when she was a teenager. He never saw her work published. Gennifer believes that he would have been proud of her.
