A world where every child sees themselves in a story — and finds their way through it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Georgena Yanoff spent more than forty years as a licensed Occupational Therapist. She has worked alongside children, and families in various settings at critical times of development, illness, an injury. Each encounter often required the building or rebuilding of foundational skills that can shape a lifetime — critical thinking, emotional regulation, problem-solving, and confidence needed to navigate a complex world. That career did not end when she retired. It transformed into something she could place directly in a child's hands.

But the seeds of the Porgy & Petunia series were planted long before retirement — in the ordinary, irreplaceable magic of bedtime. As a mother, Georgena had a gift for spinning stories on the spot, tales invented in the moment to help her own children work through the emotions and social challenges of growing up. A hard day at school. A friendship that felt confusing. A feeling too big to name. The right story had a way of making things a little clearer, a little lighter, a little more okay.

Those impromptu bedtime stories — born from real children, real feelings, and a mother's instinct to help — eventually found their way onto the page.

Her debut series grows directly from both of those sources: the clinician who spent four decades seeing child struggling in different settings to grow, and the mother who understood that the right story at the right moment can do what no worksheet ever could. Each book is built around the milestones observed across a lifetime of practice — the child who struggles to modulate their voice in a group setting, the young one who must learn that being different is not a problem to be solved but a gift to be understood, and the child struggling to cope with illness and injury.

Georgena writes for the earliest readers — ages two through five — with the conviction that the years before kindergarten are not a waiting room for real learning, but the most consequential classroom of all. Her characters are warm, vivid, and unmistakably alive, brought to the page by illustrator Milan Samadder in a visual world so rich that children return to it again and again.

An intentional choice runs through every page of the series: the use of Dyslexie Font, designed by Christian Boer, which was created to ease reading for children with dyslexia. For Georgena, this is not a technical accommodation — it is a statement of values. Every child deserves a book that was made with them in mind.

Our Mission

To publish books that build the inner life of a child — one story at a time.

The Porgy & Petunia books are not incidentally therapeutic — they are intentionally so. Every story is rooted in the developmental science of early childhood and shaped by the real emotional landscapes children navigate every day.

Our Mission is threefold:

  • Build Resilience

    Give children language and frameworks for emotions before those emotions overwhelm them.

  • Champion inclusion

    Design every book so that children of all learning styles and abilities feel genuinely welcome on the page.

  • Honor the parent

    Give caregivers a tool — not a lecture. A book that opens a conversation rather than closes one.

    We use Dyslexie Font — designed by Christian Boer specifically to support readers with dyslexia — across every title in the series. This is not an accommodation offered reluctantly. It is a design choice made proudly, because we believe accessibility is not a feature. It is a foundation.

Our Vision

A world where every child sees themselves in a story — and finds their way through it.

We believe the years between two and five are not a prologue to childhood. They are childhood at its most formative, most vivid, and most consequential. The emotions children encounter in those years — frustration, embarrassment, the ache of feeling different, the joy of belonging — are not small emotions. They are the full weight of being human, felt for the very first time.

We envision a library of books that meets children exactly where they are — not where adults wish they were.

A world where a child who learns differently finds a book set in a font made for them. Where a child who is too loud, or too quiet, or too much, or not enough, opens a page and recognizes themselves in a character who turns out to be just right.

a person in a red and green jacket with the hand on the face
a person in a red and green jacket with the hand on the face
girl holding colored shapes
girl holding colored shapes
woman in blue denim shorts sitting on gray concrete floor
woman in blue denim shorts sitting on gray concrete floor
boy wearing zip-up jacket
boy wearing zip-up jacket