Mome is the author pen name for Chenda Duong.

Chenda is a mom, writer, artist, creator, educator, thinker, philosopher, music-lover, avid-reader, nature-hiker, spiritual-hermit, good troublemaker, 1st-generation refugee, Buddhist, and former public high school English teacher.

Her love of reading began as a child when her parents used their local, neighborhood MLK Branch Library as a free childcare service.

She spent her most formative years reading Frederick Douglass, Haing S. Ngor, Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes, Beverly Cleary, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Ann M. Martin, L.M. Montgomery, Mary Shelley, Roald Dahl, E. B. White, Louis Sachar, Scott O’Dell, Gary Paulsen, John D. Fitzgerald, Jean Craighead George, Robert C. O’Brien, C.S. Lewis, Madeleine L’Engle, Louisa May Alcott, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, and Harper Lee.

Later, she fell in love with Jane Austen, Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood, T. H. White, J. R. R. Tolkien, H.G. Wells, Orson Scott Card, Carl Sagan, Kazuo Ishiguro, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Nikki Giovanni, bell hooks, Ada Limón, Ocean Vuong, and many, many others.

Chenda was born in Battambang and raised in East Oakland.

She currently lives in Elgin, Texas with her husband, Randy, their three wildly beautiful and autonomous children, and their beloved family dachshund and infamous chew hound, Anakin Rex a.k.a Anny.