PORTLAND, Ore. — When Portland native Daniel Pollack-Pelzner emailed Lin-Manuel Miranda with the subject line "Who tells your story?," he wasn't sure what to expect from the "Hamilton” creator.

But that message, sent in the spring of 2021, led to the first authorized biography of Miranda, " Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist ," published by Simon & Schuster.

"I actually sent him an e-mail with the unabashedly cringy subject line, 'Who tells your story?' and pitched him a book about how he learned to be an artist by focusing on his teachers, from his parents through his elementary school bus driver, all the way to Andrew Lloyd Weber, and he said yes," Pollack-Pelzner said.

Pollack-Pelzner, a visiting scholar of English and theater at Portland State University, grew up in

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