Joyce Wan is an award-winning author and illustrator of many best-selling books for children, including YOU ARE MY CUPCAKE, WE BELONG TOGETHER, and THE WHALE IN MY SWIMMING POOL, which was a Junior Library Guild Spring 2015 selection. When she’s not working on books, she teaches courses at The School of Visual Arts in New York City. Visit her online at www.wanart.com.
Joyce was Reach Out and Read of Greater New York’s 2015 Mills-Tannenbaum Award recipient.
At our Annual Benefit and Gala last year, during her award acceptance, she told the moving story about how, as a young child, books and visits to the library were such important aspects of her childhood.
To learn more about the impact of books and reading on Joyce’s life and career, read the interview below, which she was generous enough to grant us.
Reach Out and Read of Greater New York: Which books are among your childhood favorites?
Joyce Wan: Some of my childhood favorites include:
The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle – the imagery in this book is so bold and iconic and the little holes throughout added another dimension to the book that fascinated me as a child. This particular book inspires me in my own work today.
ROR GNY: What are your favorite titles of today?
ROR GNY: What’s your favorite childhood reading memory — whether of reading to yourself, or of someone
who read to you, or something you imagined?
stories together. That would be one of the greatest gifts my mom would ever give to me. It was in that childhood library where my love of reading and appreciation for art was born.
ROR GNY: What was your biggest idea or inspiration that came from reading?
ROR GNY: What is your favorite word?
ROR GNY: If you were going to be anything other than a writer/illustrator, what would you be?
