It was the late 1990s, and Kate DiCamillo was discouraged about ever having a writing career. Working as a “book picker” fulfilling orders at the Bookmen distribution company in Minneapolis, she had accumulated more than 450 rejections for her short stories and other writing. She was tired; her legs ached from standing all day. She belonged to a writers group where award-winning children’s author Jane Resh Thomas believed in her. But nothing was happening.

Then came the phone call that changed her life.

“I took the call in my boss’s office on the third floor of the Bookmen, among the remainders,” DiCamillo recalled during a conversation from her home in Minneapolis’s Linden Hills neighborhood. “They told me they wanted to publish ‘Because of Winn-Dixie.’ I couldn’t believe it.”

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