Janet Wong

Janet S. Wong did not set out to be a poet. She grew up in Koreatown in Los Angeles, the daughter of a Chinese-born father who had served in the U.S. Army in Korea — where he met and married her Korean-born mother. That layered, hyphenated American childhood gave her a poet's eye for the places where cultures meet and rub up against each other, but for a long time she followed a different path. She went to law school, became a corporate lawyer, and was good at it. Then one day she sat down with her husband Glenn and told him, honestly, "I think I'm becoming a mean person." She wanted to do something good with her life, something that involved children. And she walked away from law to write poetry.

It turned out to be exactly the right call. Since making that leap, Janet has written more than 30 children's books — poetry collections, picture books, and middle-grade fiction — that are celebrated for their humor, cultural richness, and the way they make young readers feel seen. Her work draws deeply from her Korean-Chinese-American heritage, and she has a particular gift for writing about identity, belonging, and everyday life in ways that are funny and true at the same time. In 2021, the NCTE Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children recognized what her readers have known for years: she is one of the finest poets writing for young people today.

She met Sylvia Vardell at a signing for her collection A Suitcase of Seaweed in the mid-1990s, and that encounter eventually grew into a full creative partnership. Together they co-founded Pomelo Books and built the Poetry Friday Anthology series and Poetry Friday Power Books — classroom-ready collections that bring diverse, contemporary poems to students and teachers across grade levels. You can explore their work together at pomelobooks.com.