Poet and children's author Janice N. Harrington grew up in Alabama and Nebraska, and both those settings figure largely in her writing. Her first book of poetry, Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone (2007), won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is also the author of The Hands of Strangers: Poems from the Nursing Home (2011) and Primitive: The Art and Life of Horace H. Pippin (2016). Her children’s books, The Chicken Chasing Queen of Lamar County (2007) and Going North (2004), have won several awards and citations, including a listing among Time Magazine’s top 10 children’s books and the Ezra Jack Keats Award from the New York Public Library.

Harrington has been awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award for emerging women writers. She has worked as a public librarian and now teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.