Joanna Ho
Joanna Ho is a Chinese-American author. She is best known for writing the 2021 picture book Eyes [That Kiss in the Corners], a The [New York Times Best Seller list|New York Times best seller]. Her writing features themes of anti-racism and self-acceptance.
Early life and education
Ho was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota to immigrants from Taiwan and China. She grew up in St. Paul, Baltimore, and the San Francisco Bay Area.Ho earned a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, and a master's from the Principal Leadership Institute at the UC Berkeley School of Education. During her time in college, she lived in Ghana for a year, where she studied traditional dance.
Career
Ho worked as an English teacher, later becoming vice principal of a San Francisco Bay Area high school. As a teacher, she sought to create a more equitable and inclusive educational experience for her students. After giving birth to her first child, she had difficulty finding picture books for him with diverse racial representation. This difficulty motivated Ho to begin writing picture books herself.In 2021, HarperCollins published Ho's first book, Eyes That Kiss in the Corners, illustrated by Dong Ho. The picture book, featuring a Taiwanese American girl who says her eyes "kiss in the corners and glow like warm tea", became a The New York Times [Best Seller list|New York Times best seller] and won a Golden Kite Award. In 2022, she published a companion book featuring a young Asian boy, Eyes that Speak to the Stars. Another companion book published in 2024, Eyes That Weave the World's Wonders, was co-authored by Liz SoHyeon Kleinrock, and addressed interracial adoption from the perspective of a girl from South Korea adopted by white Americans.
Ho continued exploring cultural identity in her 2023 picture book, Say My Name, where she gave her full Chinese name, 何曉光 Hé Xiǎo-Guāng, to one of the characters; and a 2024 book about Asian American history, We Who Produce Pearls: An Anthem for Asian America, with art by Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya. In 2022, Ho published her first young adult novel, The Silence That Binds Us, which was honored in the Asian/Pacific American Awards for Literature.
Ho co-hosts a podcast, Kidlit Happy Hour, with fellow author Caroline Kusin Pritchard. Ho and Kusin Pritchard co-authored the 2025 picture book The Day the Books Disappeared, which addresses book banning. While on tour to promote the book in October 2025, the authors were barred from a planned appearance at an elementary school when they refused a request from the San Ramon Valley Unified School District to omit mentions of book banning from their presentation.