Janet has a long history of working with young people. In spring of 2007, she created and facilitated Writing to Change the World with May Castelloe's fifth grade class at Isaac Dickson Elementary School in Asheville, North Carolina. She has volunteered  with young writers from kindergarten through fifth grade since 2002 at this same school.   While living in the Piedmont of North Carolina in the the early nineties, she worked with award winning poet and playwright Jaki Shelton Green to develop and co-facilitate a writing program for the Cedar Grove  Head Start program as part of a North Carolina Arts and Education grant.

Janet 's experience with young people includes directing and facilitating youth leadership programs for The Center for Peace Education based in Carrboro, N.C. and for Rites of Passage in Athens, Georgia. In 1994, she directed the Haw River Festival, an environmental education program serving over 2000 fourth grade children.

     Also a storyteller, Janet has performed in elementary school classrooms in Asheville, Chapel Hill, Athens, Georgia and New Paltz, New York. In 1994, she performed for hundreds of children along the Hudson River as the resident storyteller for the Pumpkin Festival, a Clear Water Sloop environmental education program. In the early nineties, she also co-founded The Far Fetchers and True Tellers, a Chapel Hill based storytelling performance  group.

Janet lives in Asheville with her husband, David, two children, Maren and Liam, dog Cody, and cat, Fiona.