Boxer Baby Battles Bedtime! by Mia Wenjen

What was the spark that started this story?

I have been training as a boxer fighter with Marc Gargaro of Nonanam Boxing Club for twelve years. He was one of the boxer trainers for the U.S. Men’s and Women’s National Boxing Team that competed at the Tokyo Olympics.  I wanted to write a boxing picture book for a very long time but had trouble figuring out a way to make it appealing to young children. It all came together when I thought of my husband who stayed home to take care of our oldest when she was born and then added in boxing idioms in a 3 round fight to get her to take a nap. He would drive her in the car in an hour loop to get her to nap on some days!

How did boxing figure in?

When I first wrote the manuscript, I had just three rounds of action trying to get Boxer Baby to take a nap and that turned out to be too short. I added spreads by extending the fight lead-up, from the weigh-in to the entrance, and ending with a rematch! As a fight fan, I love to support the fighters at my boxing gym by going to their fights. 

What was the hardest part of the writing process? What was the easiest?

For me, it’s all about finding the story’s structure. In this case, it’s using boxing idioms, and three rounds of a boxing match to lay out the story. Once I have that nailed down, it’s easier for me to write the story. 

For another picture book that is coming out in a few years, I struggled for years to write about the Japanese Internment and a modern version of that from two perspectives. When I stumbled on the reverso poem format, I was finally able to make it work.

You’ve written several picture books before Boxer Baby Battles Bedtime! Do you have any advice for aspiring authors wanting to write picture books?

When I talk to other authors, we discover that we each have a personal set of themes that is a throughline for all our books, even if we don’t realize it. It’s so hard to get picture books published, and the road is so full of rejections that it helps to have a strong conviction that “this story needs to be told.” Sometimes, it’s that final total rewrite 5, 10, or even 15 years later that gets published. My other advice is that it’s easier to get a book published than it is to get it to earn out. All authors are a brand of one, so build your social media and personal networks as early as possible. And that might be as simple as joining a few local writing groups and attending KidLit author events in your area. 

What’s next for you?

I have seven picture books coming out after Boxer Baby Battles Bedtime! Six are with Red Comet Press but not all of them have been announced yet. We Sing From the Heart: How The Slants® Took Their Fight for Free Speech to the Supreme Court! is illustrated by Victor Bizar Gómez and comes out in November of 2024. Fortune Cookies for Everyone, illustrated by Colleen Kong-Savage, comes out Fall of 2025. Postcards from Malcolm X: How Yuri Kochiyama Became a Civil Rights Activist, illustrated by Keith Henry Brown, comes out Fall of 2026.

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Mia Wenjen blogs at PragmaticMom.com. She is also the co-creator and president of nonprofit, Read Your World. Her debut picture book, Sumo Joe (Lee and Low, 2019) was selected as a Bank Street College Best Children’s Book of the Year. Food for the Future: Sustainable Farms Around the World ( Barefoot Books, 2023) is a Junior Library Guild selection and received a starred review from School Library Journal. We Sing from the Heart: How the Slants® Took Their Fight for Free Speech to the Supreme Court (Red Comet Press) and Boxer Baby Battles Bedtime (Eifrig Publishing) release in 2024. Changing the Game: Asian Pacific American Female Athletes was a Kickstarter project recently released by Scholastic. Postcards from Malcolm X: How Yuri Kochiyama Became a Civil Rights Activist (Red Comet Press) releases in 2025. Follow her @pragmaticmom on social media.