Festival Five with NSK Juror Janet Wong, by The Editors of WLT

Interviews   Janet Wong is a graduate of Yale Law School and a former lawyer who switched careers to become a children’s author. Her dramatic career change has been featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show, CNN’s Paula Zahn Show, and Radical Sabbatical. She is the author of more than thirty books for children and teens on a wide variety of subjects, including identity (A Suitcase of Seaweed & MORE), writing and revision (You Have to Write), diversity and community (Apple Pie 4th of July), peer pressure (Me and Rolly Maloo), chess (Alex and the Wednesday Chess Club), and yoga (Twist: Yoga Poems). A frequent featured speaker at literacy conferences, Wong has served as a member of several national committees, including the NCTE Poetry Committee and the ILA Notable Books for a Global Society committee. Together with Sylvia Vardell, she is the co-creator of The Poetry Friday Anthology series published by Pomelo Books. In addition to serving as a juror for the 2021 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature, Wong will participate in the Readings and Book Giveaways by the 2021 NSK Prize Jury event. Q: What was your first favorite book, the book that made you a reader? A: I think it might’ve been The Story of Bubbles the Whale—a picture book about the orca that was at Marineland, an aquatic theme park about fifteen miles from my house when I was a child. I went to Marineland when I was three or four years old, and it made a huge... Continue reading at 'World Literature Today'

[ World Literature Today | 2020-10-05 14:35:32 UTC ]

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[ The Bookseller | 2021-09-23 10:52:10 UTC ]
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[ The Washington Post | 2021-09-21 12:00:00 UTC ]
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