Joan Michelson’s first full collection, Toward the Heliopause, was published by Mad Jock Publishers, Liverpool, 2007.  Her chapbook, Letting in the Light, won Editor’s Prize, Poetic Matrix Press, California. 2002.  Joan’s poetry has been published in over fifty magazines and book anthologies in the UK and USA. Her poem Amen was selected for first prize by Poet Laureate Andrew Motion in Londonarts.co International competition,2004.  Poems were prizewinners or finalists in Strokestown International Poetry Competition, Ireland, the Scottish International Open Poetry Competition and Yorkshire Open Poetry Competition.  Joan’s work appears in British Council anthologies of new writing, most recently, NW14, 2006, in The Best of the Bellevue Literary Review , NY, 2008, and an anthology of new work by four writers,  Loffing Matters, Tindal Street Press, Birmingham, 2007.

Joan has been the recipient of numerous fellowships including a Poetry Society Placement at the Whittington Hospital, London, and a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Grant to run Community-Based Workshops, and for writing residencies at the Virginia Center for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, the Atlantic Center of the Arts, the Djerassi Foundation, USA, and Fundacion Valparaiso, Spain.

Until 2003, she was Senior Lecturer, Head of Creative Writing and Holocaust Literature at the University of Wolverhampton. She works as a writer-in-the-schools and teaches Creative Writing/Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London. Originally from Boston, Mass., she lives in the UK.

Toward the Heliopause was selected as a Book of the Year, 2007, by Anthony Rudolf, www.readysteadybook.com and as Poetry Kit Book of the Month, March 2008.  There is also a CD of a live reading, with music, from the book.

Responses to Joan’s work:

‘a good sense of drama and a fine ear’

CK Williams (USA) Pulitzer Prize Poet

‘marvellous, mysterious’.

U.A. Fanthorpe (UK) Oxford Professor of Poetry

Comments on Toward the Heliopause:

In an unflinching retracing of emotions and events, travelling a journey of  breathtaking range, Joan’s poems pursue the heart of loss and the tenacious loving needed to face unexpected bereavement and move on.

Gillie Bolton, Medicine and the Arts, King College, London, UK

This is a haunting, beautiful collection. Joan Michelson has registered the presence of absence. We feel Geoffrey Adkins in his own marvelously alert creations. Joan’s poems speak to his while possessing their own burnished solidity with a rueful, honest sense of being on one’s own.

Baron Wormser, Poetry Professor, The Frost Center, NH, USA

A delicate, elegiac collection.

Michelene Wandor, Poet and Playwright, UK

e-mail Joan

and in the shop ...
collection:
"Toward the Heliopause"
(book & CD);
Mad Jock
Publishers;

chapbook:
"Letting in the Light";

anthology:
Loffing Matters,
Tindal Street Press

© of all poems featured on this site remains with the poet
site feedback welcome