In
just a few short years, Janet Wong has radically changed
her career from a Yale-trained lawyer to a talented and skilled poet who
pushes against the boundaries of craft and ideology. The spirited and feisty
poems that filled her earliest collections,
Good Luck Gold and Other
Poems and A Suitcase of Seaweed and Other Poems, were
immediately loved by critics and welcomed in classrooms across the country.
Since then she has reached an increasingly wide audience by exploring an
energetic range of topics, styles, and techniques in critically acclaimed
collections such as The Rainbow Hand: Poems About Mothers and Children,
Behind the Wheel: Poems about Driving, and Night Garden: Poems
from the World of Dreams. A Suitcase of Seaweed was selected
a notable children's trade book by the National Council for the Social
Studies. Ms. Wong is also the recipient of the International Reading Association's
Celebrate Literacy Award. In addition to maintaining a prolific writing
career, Ms. Wong works extensively in schools, sharing her passion and
promoting a love of poetry. Her work has been praised for its "enticing
freshness, freedom, and candor." Her current and forthcoming books
include Buzz, Night Garden: Poems From the World of Dreams,
The Trip Back Home, This Next New Year, and Grump.
Janet Wong lives in a suburb of Seattle with her husband and their young
son.