Featured Interview With Author Andrea Kurth
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I'm from Michigan and love my state, at least in the summer! Although I've lived all over the state throughout my life with moving with my family as a kid and going away to two colleges, I mainly grew up in Clawson, and moved just 30 minutes away to my town now, Lake Orion. The city in my book is Lake Lawson, a combo of the two towns which I love.
We have a dog named Otto.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
Although I always wanted to be a special education teacher, looking back I see how much I also wanted to write. As a kid, I had my own Hallmark store of cards I made and sold to family members, I had a newspaper for the street I lived on with a friend (writing about what was happening in the neighborhood), as well as I wrote screenplays with another friend that we mailed in to General Hospital! Of course, they disregarded our letters, but we were convinced a few scenes came from our scripts.
As a special education teacher, I learned how important it was that all kids were represented in books. This was a very important message of diversity that I believed I needed to incorporate into my classroom. As I started reading books with kids of different races to my students, I realized that my students' disabilities weren't being represented, so my students couldn't see themselves in the stories. More recently, I found books that explained various disabilities, which are important to have in classroom libraries, but I wanted to read fun, exciting chapter books to my students in which they also could see themselves.
Then I met Zac, a hilarious kid who had an effect on everyone he met. I’m not sure what it was, but while I was teaching him, I felt like God told me I needed to write a book that represented Zac. He was in a wheelchair, like a lot of my students at the time, but had a degenerative type of MD called Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Unfortunately, Zac was 5 months shy of seeing the actual book come to life, but I’m sure he is happy that other kids in wheelchairs are being represented in books, and more importantly that he is the main character who’s a superhero. 10% of our profits from books one and two are donated to DMD.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
My all-time favorite is JK Rowling, I love the Harry Potter books! I like most genres, from mysteries to romance. For my children's books, I think I was most inspired by the Captain Underpants series! My kids made me read those to them when they were younger and I grew to love them.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
Zac's Mighty Wheels and the Case of the Missing Grannies is a superhero adventure where Zac and his friends need to find their grandmas. Don't worry though, it's a kid's book so the grandmas don't even know they have been missing! Zac becomes a superhero in the first book of the series when he makes a wish for the wheelchair of his dreams. It is action packed and a fun story for any elementary age kid. My son Braden helped me write this book, he will be a senior next year, and it was fun working with him on it.
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