When Joan Alice Wood Kimball was fourteen, she saw Lawrence Olivier in Henry IV, Part 1 on the New York stage. She was smitten! She started reading the plays and the sonnets. In her teens, Joan wrote wrenching lines about the cruelty of life, leaving these agonies on slips of paper where her mother could find them. Her mother said nothing, but gave her Oscar Williams’ Little Treasury of Great Poetry, which she devoured. She was a year ahead of Sylvia Plath at Smith College, where they both took Marie Boroff’s creative fiction class. That connection has been erased along with the blackboards. Over the years Joan tried various hats: title searcher, English teacher, copy editor, manager of a bookstore, librarian.
When she retired from library work, she and her husband Geoff moved to Concord, Mass. A founder of the Concord Poetry Center, she belonged for six years to the comic troupe, X. J. Kennedy & the Light Brigade. She is a member of Powow River Poets and runs poetry study groups at the Wayland and Concord libraries. She was a Finalist for the Morton Marr and Atlanta Review poetry prizes, published two illustrated poetry books, This River Hill (2009) and Summer River (2013), and co-edited with Debra Martin the posthumous collection of Walter Howard’s poetry, Reflections in Moonlight (2018). Her limerick, “Cold October,” is inscribed on granite in Edmands Park, Newton, Mass.
Paperback: 101 pages
Publisher: Kelsay Books (November 25, 2019)