Joan did a degree in English Literature and Language at Edinburgh University, followed by a year at the University of California gaining a postgraduate Master’s. She has lived in Southampton for many years, combining writing with part-time teaching.
 
She has taught both English and Creative Writing in a variety of contexts: adult education, sixth form colleges and university. After twelve years as an Associate Lecturer helping set up, and teaching, a Creative Writing degree at the University of Winchester, she left there in 2017 to begin a Creative Writing Ph.D. at Southampton University. A third volume of poems is planned as a major outcome.
 
Joan has been awarded two Arts Council bursaries: one to be Millennium Poet in Residence on Southampton Common, another to be mentored by the poet Jane Draycott. She was a featured poet in Peterloo Preview 3, had a poem read on BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Please and has been published widely in magazines and pamphlets such as Staple, South, Envoi, The Red Wheelbarrow, Obsessed with Pipework, Poems in the Waiting Room, Poetry Scotland and Prairie Schooner. She reviews poetry for South magazine. Her first full-length collection, Flannelgraphs, was published by Oversteps Books in July 2011. The award of a Hawthornden Fellowship in June 2012 afforded valuable writing time for a second volume, Passing Arcadia Close (Oversteps 2017). In the intervening years, she was Hampshire Poet 2014, a role where she promoted poetry and reading across the county and fulfilled five poetry commissions. She also became, and remains, a trustee of the Winchester Poetry Festival, now (2018) due for its third iteration. For the first festival, in 2014, she curated Hogwords, New Poetry from Hampshire, which includes poems by Robyn Bolam, Stephen Boyce, John Haynes, Maggie Sawkins, Nick MacKinnon, and Julian Stannard.
 
She is married to an academic specializing in medieval popular culture, and they have a grown-up son and daughter.