Andrew Maraniss is a famous author who was born in Madison, Wisconsin. He’s known for titles such as “Strong Inside: Perry Wallace and the Collision of Race and Sports in the South” and received the Lillian Smith Book Award for the book in 2015. On March 3, he came to Eureka High School on an author visit. This visit was in the library during AcLab where students were able to sign up and listen to him.
“Author visits inspire students by bringing literature to life, hopefully creating a love of reading and encouraging aspiring writers,” Dr. Ashley Eiswirth(Librarian) said. “Meeting an author helps students connect with books on a deeper level, making reading more engaging and relevant to their lives. These visits also promote library engagement and enhance classroom learning by showing the real-world impact of storytelling.”
Eiswirth and the other librarians explained that they choose authors based on students’ interests, connections and potential for them to inspire a love for reading and writing. The librarians also choose authors with engaging styles of presentation, unique perspectives and have books that resonate with the high school students and have won awards, an example being Maraniss because he had a book on the Dogwood Award Nominees for the year of 2025.
“Last year we hosted several author visits,” Eiswirth said. “We usually try to do between one and three author visits per year. This is the first one this year, and there are not any others on the schedule for this year, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we were able to bring in one more this year.”
Despite having one author for the year, it didn’t seem to bother the librarians as they seemed to expect this.
“The number we can do each year is limited to our budget and author availability,” Eiswirth said. “This year, we’ve hosted only one, but in years past we’ve hosted two or three each year. Author visits are a common practice in libraries both public and school libraries.”
Not many students came to visit the author, but it wasn’t too little either. Some adults attended as well to hear what the author had to say along with the students that had managed to come.
Maraniss’s first book was “Strong Inside”, and he wrote it because Perry Wallace inspired him. Perry was the first African-American athlete to play basketball.
“I read about Perry and the racism directed at him,” Maraniss said. “At halftime he sat in the locker room holding hands with his teammate, Godfrey Dillard, trying to get the strength to get back for the second half.”
Throughout Perry’s life in college and basketball, he went through tough times as his teammates never had his back except for Dillard. He dealt with racism, abuse and loneliness throughout his life. He had to deal with threats and slurs from the crowd, cheering every time he missed a shot, booing him when he made one and even cheered when he got injured in the game by a player he was playing against, taking an elbow to his eye, proving that they didn’t like Perry at all.
“It took tremendous courage, more than people even imagine,” Maraniss said. “He had to do it by himself. After freshman year, there were no other African-American teammates. His coaches and teammates didn’t go out of their way to be difficult but they weren’t helpful.”
Maraniss wanted “Strong Inside” to be for young readers.
“It wasn’t my idea at first,” Maraniss said. “I was in a coffee shop in Nashville, and the book reporter for The Tennessean was interviewing Ruta Sepetys, who has had great success with her books for young adults.”
Ruta Sepetys, author of “Salt to the Sea”, later introduced Maraniss to Philomel, her author and helped him publish the book. She played an important role supporting young readers’ perspective of “Strong Inside”.
“That’s the problem for pioneers; you don’t know what could possibly happen to you. When you don’t know what’s going to happen, the sky is the limit,” Wallace said.
