Do we like Mo Willems?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Decent record, a clear stand against a stereotype and real giving for kids' books, but the public record on his wider views is thin.
Mo Willems is the bloke behind the Pigeon, the Elephant & Piggie books and a heap of other picture books. He is the child of Dutch immigrants, born in Des Plaines near Chicago and raised mostly in New Orleans. He has said he didn't have a happy childhood, and that “Books and comics saved me.”
That explains a lot of the work. He wants his characters to look straight at the reader because he remembers feeling overlooked as a kid. He has also said that “Yelling in a library is radical and fun.” His 2023 opera for kids, The Ice Cream Truck is Broken!, played the Kennedy Center.
On the harm check, the record is clean as far as we could find. The standout is 2017, when he, Mike Curato and Lisa Yee pulled out of a festival at the Dr. Seuss museum in Springfield, Massachusetts. They objected to a mural showing a stereotype of a Chinese man, which they called “obviously offensive”. The museum then agreed to remove it. We found nothing harmful in his words or in the company he keeps. Honestly, the public record on his wider politics is thin.
He has put money behind getting books to kids too. In 2016 he and his wife Cher matched up to US$50,000 in new donations to First Book, a nonprofit that supplies new books to children in need. That's a real gift, not a photo-op.
Lately he's been busy. It's My Bird-Day!, a new Pigeon book, came out in March 2026, and the Chicago Public Library Foundation had him down to receive its Carl Sandburg Literary Award on 13 October. In September, Kirkus reported he is writing a book for adults about the craft of writing, which he described on Instagram as an experiment “many years in the making”.
We searched for lawsuits, court outcomes and allegations and found none against him. Nothing in this look turned up bad behaviour or dodgy mates. The caveat is that he mostly keeps his politics out of the headlines, so this verdict rests on a clean record and a couple of clear acts, not a long paper trail.