Don Winslow

So I thought I should write five pages a day. And that's what I did. Eventually I had a book.

I was a safari guide in the 1980s in Kenya.

I was trying in 'The Power of the Dog' to write a brutally accurate in-your-face, if you will, description of 30 years in the war on drugs. And the effect that that had on people.

Shaft was a pop culture figure along t he lines of, I guess, Dirty Harry - except that he wasn't as much of a racist. So yeah, I was always a fan.

I taught English, first at a Catholic school and then at El Toro High School in Lake Forest, Calif.

I have a lot of kids in my district who haven't been to the beach, much less Washington, D.C., and that's 20 miles away.