Kids' Letters To The Obamas Books in Order

The Kids’ Letters To The Obamas series sits a little apart from Jory John’s picture books and novels. Instead of talking animals or personified food, these titles highlight real children writing directly to the White House and to the family that lived there.

The project began at 826 Valencia, the nonprofit writing center in San Francisco where John worked for years. In the weeks after Barack Obama was elected president, he asked a group of students to write letters to the incoming leader. The assignment was simple: offer advice, share worries, or just tell the new president something about your life. The responses were funny, blunt, thoughtful, and often surprisingly moving.

Those classroom pages eventually became Thanks and Have Fun Running the Country: Kids’ Letters to President Obama. The book gathers letters from children in several cities, covering everything from the economy and war to pets, school lunches, and the best kind of family dog. Some kids urge the president to fix big national problems. Others focus on the details that matter in their own homes and neighborhoods. Together, they form a snapshot of how young people were thinking about the moment.

On the page, the voices are left largely intact. Spelling quirks, kid logic, and hand drawn illustrations all survive the editing process, which is part of the charm. Adults reading the book get the sense of peeking into a writing workshop in full swing. Kids reading it can recognize their own concerns and see that their peers take issues like fairness, safety, and the environment seriously.

A later companion, I Miss You, Barack Obama, leans more heavily into humor. It presents a set of postcards that capture the way many adults and teens felt after the Obama years, pairing illustrations of the former president and his circle with jokes about nostalgia, politics, and everyday life. The tone is playful and affectionate, designed more as a keepsake than a traditional narrative.

Both books show another side of John’s work. They draw on his time mentoring young writers and his interest in giving kids real platforms rather than imagined ones. Instead of writing in a child’s voice himself, he steps back and curates what actual children have to say.

For readers exploring this series page, you will find information on the letter collection and related Obama themed humor, plus context on how these titles grew out of classroom projects. They are useful as conversation starters about civics and voice, but they also work simply as sharp, funny glimpses of how kids see the people in power.