Bio
Music professor Joanna White has creative works in JAMA (The Poetry and Medicine Column of the Journal of the American Medical Association), The Examined Life Journal, Ars Medica, Healing Muse, The MacGuffin, Measure, Dunes Review, Cherry Tree, Cape Rock, Chariton Review, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Earth’s Daughters, Pulse, Temenos, West Texas Literary Review, Intima, Naugatuck River Review (as a poetry contest finalist), the American Journal of Nursing, and in KYSO Flash Anthologys among others. Her short and long collections have reached book contest finals multiple times, she has a December 2020 winter broadside with The Michigan Poet, and her first collection, Drumskin and Bones, has been accepted by Salmon in Ireland for March 1, 2021 publication.
While her poetry covers a range of topics, forms, and styles, it often falls under the purview of medical humanities. She explores themes of childhood medical terror, the need to be heard, the struggle to speak up, resilience, and the importance of voice in the forging of intimate connections between people. She tells us what it is like for a professional musician to have focal dystonia, a malady in which brain signals are corrupted, making the once-natural ability to play a musical instrument as illusive, as disorienting, as writing with your non-dominant hand.
Joanna White, who studied poetry with Robert Fanning and Jeffrey Bean and fiction with Darrin Doyle, has read her poetry or presented poetry at conferences of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature, Michigan College English Association, National Flute Association, the Wellspring Series as a community reader, the Western Michigan University Medical Humanities Conference, and twice at the Examined Life Conference at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine. She is an external reader for Medical Literary Messenger, the medical humanities journal of Virginia Commonwealth University. In addition to a doctorate in music, White has a master's degree in English Language and Literature with a creative writing emphasis from Central Michigan University. She has attended the Bear River Writer's Conference, the Iota Short Forms Conference, where she studied with Sven Birkerts and Beth Ann Fennelly for a few days, and won a Herman Wells Poetry Scholarship to attend the Indiana University Writer's Conference in summer 2019.
As a flutist, Joanna White records for Centaur Records, White Pine Music, and Blue Griffin, and has performed in Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, New Mexico, Nevada, California, Washington D.C. England, Italy, Japan, and more. She writes articles for music journals and is a reviewer for Flutist Quarterly, the Journal of the National Flute Association. She has recently been combining music and poetry, presenting them together around the United States, and can be heard on the Centaur Records compact disc (see Music section on this poetry website), Poet as Muse: Music for Flute, Clarinet, and Voice.
CONTACT Joanna White
silverjcgold@gmail.com
Link to music website: Joannawhiteflute.com