Joanne Diaz grew up in Billerica, Massachusetts. She received her BA from Tufts University; her MFA from New York University, where she was a New York Times fellow; and her PhD in English literature from Northwestern University. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 32 Poems, AGNI, The American Poetry Review, DIAGRAM, The Greensboro Review, The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and Third Coast. She is the recipient of an artist fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her book, The Lessons, won the Gerald Cable first book award from Silverfish Review Press and was published in Spring 2011.

Joanne is also an active scholar and teacher. She has presented her research on complaint poetry at the Villanova Law, Literature, and Religion symposium and at annual meetings of the Modern Language Association, the Shakespeare Association of America, the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and the Sixteenth Century Society. Joanne is the interview editor for The Spoon River Poetry Review. She is an assistant professor in the English department at Illinois Wesleyan University.

If you would like to contact Joanne directly for a reading or workshop, you can reach her at jdiaz[at]iwu.edu