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Jan Slepian (born January 2, 1921) is an author of books for children and young adults. Born Janice Berek in New York City, she obtained a degree in psychology at Brooklyn College, later doing graduate work in clinical psychology and speech pathology at the University of Washington in Seattle. She worked as a speech therapist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and before embarking on a writing career.

With co-author Ann Seidler, she published several illustrated books in a series called the "The Listen-Hear Books". Titles included The Hungry Thing, The Hungry Thing Returns and The Hungry Thing Goes to a Restaurant: all three are for young readers and teach about phonemic awareness; they also co-authored The Cat Who Wore a Pot on Her Head, Alfie and the Dream Machine and several other titles.

Some of her books deal with mental disability, including The Alfred Summer (1980) Lester's Turn (1981) (both of which feature the voice of a child afflicted by cerebral palsy) and Risk n' Roses (1990).

Books for adolescent readers include The Night of the Bozos (1983), The Broccoli Tapes (1989), Pinocchio's Sister (1995), Mind Reader (1997) and Emily Just in Time (1998).

Her husband was the noted mathematician David Slepian.

Her most recent book, "Astonishment", (ISBN 0-557-04914-8) is a collection of twenty brief essays on aging and life in a retirement community.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Jan Slepian", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0