Janis Ian

Janis Ian (born 1951) is an American singer-songwriter, columnist, and author whose recording career spans more than five decades and ten Grammy nominations, with two wins. She first reached national audiences as a teenager with Society's Child and returned to the charts in 1975 with At Seventeen, a confessional ballad of adolescent loneliness that became a standard.

She was born Janis Eddy Fink on 7 April 1951 in Farmingdale, New Jersey. Her father Victor Fink was a chicken farmer turned music teacher, and her mother Pearl was a homemaker and later college administrator. The family moved between New Jersey and New York's Lower East Side, exposing her to Greenwich Village folk music in her childhood.

She wrote Hair of Spun Gold at twelve and saw it published in Broadside, then composed Society's Child at fourteen, recorded it the next year, and toured with it after Leonard Bernstein featured the song on a CBS television special in 1967. She left high school to perform full-time.

Her 1975 album Between the Lines won the Grammy for Best Pop Vocal Performance Female. She continued releasing studio albums into the 2020s, wrote a long-running column for The Advocate, came out as a lesbian in 1993, and published the memoir Society's Child in 2008 and the novel The Light at the End of the World in 2023. She lives in Nashville with her wife Pat Snyder.

Her name Janis derives from the Hebrew Yochanan via the feminine form of John, meaning "Yahweh is gracious." Janis is a feminine name used in English-speaking countries, popularised in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s.