Lydia Cohn, a Plymouth Meeting author, is honoring her late mother Joan Yingling by turning the many poems she wrote into children’s books, writes M. English for The Times Herald.

Cohn and her six siblings grew up in Merion Station. When her parents decided to downsize, Cohn was happy to take the folder that contained her mother’s poetry.

After her mother passed away, Cohn started considering the possibility of “somehow publishing her poems.”

One of her daughters, Jess, an acquisitions editor at Mascot Books Publishing, gave her the idea to reimagine each poem as the storyline of an illustrated children’s book.

“That’s brilliant, I thought,” said Cohn. “Jess said we have a whole team here (at Mascot), illustrators, everything you’d need. It was like a lightbulb went off. So, that’s how it all started.”

The first book released was The Story of The Can’t That Could in 2019, followed by The Story of The Curious Elf in 2021. The author is currently working on the third book in the series.

Cohen has also started an eponymous website and a writers’ networking group to “share ideas of creative ways to market our books.”

Read more about Lydia Cohn in The Times Herald.