J erry Spinelli was born on February 1, 1941, in Norristown, Pennsylvania, where he spent his childhood living in a brick row house in the West End. At sixteen, he wrote his first poem celebrating a victory of his high school football team. After a local paper published it, he claims that he stopped wanting to be a major league baseball player and started wanting to be a writer. He graduated from Gettysburg College with an A.B. degree in 1963. In 1964 he received an M.A.

from the Writing Seminar of the Johns Hopkins University. He also attended Temple University in 1964. He married Eileen Mesi, herself a writer, on May 21, 1977. When they got married, she already had six children. As of 1990, he and Eileen had one more child.

During the years 1966 to 1989, when he worked for a technical publisher, Spinelli continued to desire to be a...