Skip to Content




jaenet bio

Jaenet was born in New York City on Thursday morning, December 5, 1963. She loved to color and paint from the time she could hold a paint brush, pencil, marking pen. She drew an entire landscape of train tracks on one of her grandmother's puffy white sofas. She loved to be read to at bedtime. Winnie the Pooh was one of her favorites.

She started writing and illustrating books at an early age. She wrote several for her sisters. They were tales of knights and dragons.

She made up long plays with puppets. She pressed her little sister to act in these with her. They sat behind a blue folding screen and acted out impromptu dramas that usually involved kings, queens, and kittens.

School work took up most of her writing time after second or third grade. One summer she went to ballet camp. She loved ballet.

After she graduated from high school, she went to college. Many colleges. Finally she settled down in New York.

Happy to be back in the city again, she enrolled in ballet school(s) and spent a long time trying to find a pair of ballet shoes that fit.

She acquired her first dog, D'Art - for D'Artaegnon, one of the Three Musketeers. He was a Springer Spaniel of exceptional love, courage, and intelligence.

While she was in New York, she wrote and illustrated Herman and Poppy Go Singing in the Hills. It was her first "real" book. She spent at least a year perfecting the colored pencil and ink illustrations. It was published by Azro Press in 1997. Her first book signing was a huge success and the book nearly sold out right away. People like stories about horses and ponies. D'Art's photo can be found on the inside back cover of Herman and Poppy (1997).

Her second book, Grow Grow Grow (poem by Barbara Riley), is about a sunflower seed that grows to be a huge sunflower in spite of adversity. The pictures are collages of paper cut into many small to tiny pieces and glued together. Her flat really did look like it had been hit by a storm of confetti (2002).

The last book in this series is Next Week When I'm Big. Jaenet wrote the text and Suana Verelst drew the pictures. The story reflects how children see the world with words like "next week" having the same meaning as "a long time from now" or "when I am a grown up."

Jaenet also created two new illustrated books: Look, Roger, It's Florence and The Fussy Little Butterfly, which are included on this website.

After that, Jaenet began her movie career. She attended USC in Los Angeles long enough to finally earn a BA degree cum laude (2008). A movie emerged out of these years. It is called Great Danes and is currently in the editing stage (2011-2012).

At the same time, Jaenet was asked by the New Mexico Museum of Natural History's interim director, Dr Spencer G Lucas, to write about the building of a new exhibit hall in the museum. During its construction, Jaenet took thousands of photographs and wrote pages and pages about the project. This book is finished and is available now. Look for it on the Azro Press website - www.azropress.com

Please visit Jaenet's memorial website for more about her:

memorialwebsites.legacy.com/jaenetguggenheim

Jaenet on the set.