BY DAVID MAMARIL HOROWITZ

david.horowitz@bgdailynews.com

Raising expectations to dash them repeatedly, Jarrett J. Krosoczka went back and forth with some 200 Warren Elementary students – many, leaning in with curiosity – as he recounted two years of early-career rejections.

To a resigned audience, Krosoczka asked an umpteenth time: “I mailed (…) 80 postcards out to 80 different people at all of these different publishers. Of the 80 people who received these postcards, how many of those 80 people got in touch with me?”

“None,” replied most of the students.

“One person,” he said – finally. “And that’s all you need …. But to find that one person, I had to send my work out to hundreds of people.”

The New York Times-bestselling author and illustrator delivered four presentations to the more than 700 students across the Warren Elementary’s K-6 student body Tuesday. Pushing to enhance reading and literacy, Warren Elementary had used allocated federal grant monies to purchase two of Krosoczka’s books for each student, Warren Elementary Principal Josh Porter said.

“The more pieces of literacy we can put in their hands and build their home libraries, the better off they’re going to be,” Porter said. “We’re consistently on the lookout for authors … We want books to come alive.”

The 46-year-old Krosoczka estimates that he’s spoken at a few thousand schools over his 23 years being published, in which he’s written 46 books primarily for young readers. A storyteller’s tools – cadence, tone, emphasis and so on – were at the forefront of the day’s second presentation, delivered to some 200 third and fourth graders at the school gymnasium. Krosoczka visualized this snappy, interactive speech alongside projected photos of family, childhood drawings, archives, art tools and more.

Then, Krosoczka fielded some 33 questions from the audience as he sketched live.

“I tell stories with words and pictures in my books, and I tell stories with words and pictures in my presentations,” Krosoczka told the Daily News.

”It’s a performance, it’s a one-man show, and like any performer, I’ve delivered the story thousands of times, but I’m delivering it like it’s the first time I’ve ever delivered it.”

One aim, he said, was to demystify the creative process.

“ … I share with them the books and comics and silly little drawings I was making in elementary school so that they can make a direct connection with that, so they don’t just see me as the adult who just publishes these books; I was a kid like them,” he said. “I had my own creative journey, and there’s going to be obstacles in their way in life. So, on one hand, (there are) those creative kids who like to draw. But for any kid, no matter what they want to do, there are going to be rejections. And the difference between somebody who succeeds in what they want to do and don’t is that they push past those rejections, and they keep at it.”

Warren Elementary fourth grader Edrai Jiminez, 9, was silently enthused. After the presentation, Jiminez – who has an interest in drawing, himself – flipped through Krosoczka’s hit graphic novel “Lunch Lady.”

“It was good,” he said about the presentation.

He added about the author’s books: “I also felt like I wanted to make some.”