Alan Gratz ALAN GRATZ is the author of the League of Seven series, Samurai Shortstop, and Prisoner B-3087. He began writing The League of Seven, winner of the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Young Adult Book Award, by listing all the things that ten-year-old Alan would have thought were awesome, including brass goggles, airships, tentacled monsters, brains in jars, windup robots, secret societies, and super powers. (In fact, he still thinks all those things are awesome.) He lives in North Carolina with his wife and daughter.