Northwestern Intersections

Irene Kang ’11 has lived multiple lives. In her first she worked in the field of environmentalism and sustainability. In her second, she's the founder of Spark Collection—bilingual books for families to learn language in a fun and meaningful way. Throughout the course of these lives, the most important decisions she made were by trusting her intuition when something felt right: choosing Northwestern, pursuing environmentalism, and meeting her husband (and fellow alumni) Chris, and creating Spark Collection. Kang shares how she realized during the pandemic that there were very few accessible resources for teaching Asian languages to children. And that this was issue many Asian and multicultural families struggled with themselves. Kang decided to create Spark Collection, and published her first book with the incredible community support of Kickstarter: My Favorite Gift. Available in Mandarin, Hindi, and recently, Korean. She previews the second book in the collection, My Beautiful Earth coming out in September