Joanna Pearson grew up in North Carolina and holds degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University College Dublin, and the Johns Hopkins University. Her poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2010, Gulf Coast, The New Criterion, River Styx, Subtropics, and elsewhere. Her first novel for young adults, The Rites and Wrongs of Janice Wills, was published in 2011. (Author photo by Matthew Buckley Smith)
Donald Justice Prize
"The precise gaze and chiseled language of the poems in Oldest Mortal Myth authoritatively convey a broad and deep knowledge. Whether re-imagining a Greek myth in order to infuse it with a contemporary pain, extending empathy and humorous Mitmenschkeit to both denizens and voyeurs of the world's freak-shows, or describing with wit and experience the spiritual effects of medical conditions, the book is infused with restrained but piercing emotion, a subtle metrical ear, and enough daring and wit to write in rhymed couplets ..."
—Marilyn Nelson
Judge, 2012 Donald Justice Poetry Prize
Story Line Press
