This article relies excessively on references to primary sources. Please improve this article by adding secondary or tertiary sources. Find sources: "Janet S. Wong" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (December 2020) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
Janet S. Wong
BornLos Angeles, California, United States
LanguageEnglish
EducationB.A. in History, J.D. in Law
Alma materUCLA, Yale Law School
Genrepoetry, picture books, middle grade fiction, young adult fiction, non-fiction
Years active1994—now
Notable worksAlex and the Wednesday Chess Club; A Suitcase of Seaweed & MORE
Notable awards2021 NCTE Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children; 2001 and 2001-2003 Asian/Pacific American Award for Young Adult Literature; 2005 ILA Celebrate Literacy Award
Website
www.janetwong.com//

Janet S. Wong is an American poet and author of children's books. She has written over 30 books, primarily poetry, picture books, and middle grade fiction. At the age of seven, she had an active imagination. She used this later in her life to write poetry and books. She is the co-creator (with Sylvia Vardell) of The Poetry Friday Anthology series and the Poetry Friday Power Book series, published by Pomelo Books. Her most recent book is HOP TO IT: Poems to Get You Moving, an anthology of 100 poems by 90 poets that focuses on the topics of movement, the pandemic, and social justice. She is the winner of the 2021 NCTE Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children, a lifetime achievement award considered the most prestigious award that a children's poet can receive.

Personal life

[edit]

Wong was born in Los Angeles, California, and grew up in Koreatown, as the child of a Chinese immigrant father and a Korean immigrant mother. Her parents met while her father was serving in the U.S. Army in Korea. She grew up speaking neither Chinese nor Korean, something she regrets and discusses when addressing a multilingual audience. When she was seven, her family moved to San Anselmo, California. This move from an urban area to a semi-rural/suburban area, where children would catch lizards after school, was featured in her book Minn and Jake.

Wong is married and lives in Princeton, NJ.

Career

[edit]

During her junior year at UCLA, Wong went to France to study art history at the Université de Bordeaux. When she returned from France, she co-founded the UCLA Immigrant Children's Art Project, an initiative to encourage refugees to express themselves through art.

Wong graduated from UCLA summa cum laude with a B.A. in history in 1983, and later attended Yale Law School while occasionally working as a substitute teacher. She graduated from Yale Law School with a J.D. in 1987.[1]

Prior to becoming an author, Wong practiced corporate and labor law as Director of Labor Relations at Universal Studios Hollywood.

While browsing in a book store, looking for a gift for her baby cousin, she fell in love with picture books and decided she wanted to try writing them herself. The first thing she wrote, however, was a middle grade novel that she never sent to any publishers. She then wrote a picture book manuscript every week. After receiving many rejection letters, she realized that she needed to work on her craft. In 1991, she decided to attend a writing class in poetry taught by Myra Cohn Livingston through UCLA Extension. She spent eighteen months honing her craft and attending writing classes before she was able to publish her first book, Good Luck Gold and Other Poems.[2][3][4]

Works

[edit]

Picture books

[edit]

in print

[edit]

Additional Picture books

[edit]

Additional Children's Books

[edit]

Poetry Collections

[edit]

Anthologies Created with Sylvia Vardell

[edit]

(Included in) Anthologies Edited by Others

[edit]

Awards

[edit]

Won

References

[edit]
  1. ^ "Janet S. Wong". Charlesbridge. Retrieved 2019-04-11.
  2. ^ "A video interview with Janet Wong". Reading Rockets. 2013-08-09. Retrieved 2019-04-11.
  3. ^ "Teachingbooks.net Original In-depth Author Interview" (PDF). Teachingbooks.net. Retrieved 11 April 2019.
  4. ^ "Transcript from an interview with Janet Wong". Reading Rockets. 2013-08-12. Retrieved 2023-05-19.
Categories