Lee Edward Fodi: Hello. My name is Lee Edward Fodi or FOO-DEE if you are a Hungarian. There are a lot of stories about my name. We can start with the Hungarian part. When my grandfather immigrated from Hungary in the 1920s, his name was anglicized and spelled F-O-D-E-Y, a change from F-O-D-I. This really bothered my grandfather. It bothered him until the day he died. I was quite close to him, so I decided that, when I was going to get published, I would legally change the spelling of my name back to the original F -O-D-I. Sometimes you see the O with two little dots above it, and that's called an umlaut, and it's meant to help with the pronunciation.

Then there's my first name, Lee. My parents, for some reason, just assumed I was going to be a girl, so they had no boy names picked out for me. When I arrived, they had to suddenly pick a boy's name. I suppose they might have drawn on the English or Celtic part of my heritage to come up with name of Lee. I'm actually quite fond of it, but it's caused me all sorts of problems in my travels through Asia. Lee is probably the most common last name in all of the world, so everyone assumes, in Asia, that my last name is Lee, and they call me Mr. Lee. This is one of the reasons I was tagged with the nickname Mr. Wiz. A lot of my readers and a lot of the kids that I've met through creative writing classes now just call me Mr. Wiz, and it's made my life so much easier.