Jennifer Mook-Sang

Jennifer Mook-Sang was born in Guyana, South America, and moved to Canada at the age of fourteen. Since she can remember, she’s loved to read. Summers would find her curled up with humungous stacks of comic books. When she’d read those a trillion times over and knew them by heart, she’d start reading her textbooks for the coming year.

Public speaking wasn’t expected of students in Guyana, so when she came to Canada and discovered she had to do a class presentation, Jennifer was a little nervous. But she managed to survive giving a speech about Leonardo da Vinci. Phew! After high school she went to the Universities of Toronto and Waterloo and earned two degrees in psychology.

Jennifer didn’t consider writing until she began reading stories to her own kids. Those books were so much fun and so clever, creating one seemed like the best thing anyone could do. She took writing classes and workshops and read lots about writing. She wrote bad stuff and not-so-bad stuff until she had written a whole book about a boy who really didn’t want to give a speech.

In one of Jennifer’s writing classes, the instructor invited everyone to read something they had written to each other. “It’s good practice,” he said, “for reading from your book when you’re rich and famous with thousands of fans.” Jennifer thought that was funny. Since then, she’s been practising reading out loud and, someday, she hopes to be able to read from her book to perhaps dozens of fans.

Jennifer lives in Burlington with her husband, who likes to garden (his last name is Gardner, isn’t that cool?). Her two grown sons are both seriously into technology. And while one prefers to quietly create video games, the other really enjoys giving speeches about his work. When she isn’t writing, Jennifer likes to read recipe books and cook things like biryani, cassava pone, and guacamole. She can also twist a mean balloon animal.