Extended Bio

JoAnn Balingit was born in Columbus, OH to a German American mother and Filipino father. She grew up in Lakeland, FL, third eldest in a family of twelve children. JoAnn studied English and French literature at Florida State University, and Literary Criticism as a Regents Fellow at The University of California, Irvine. After receiving her MA, she moved to Morocco to work at The American School of Tangier. She lived abroad for several more years in Lisbon, Portugal, teaching English as a foreign language. Her daughters Savannah and Bahiya were born in Tangier and Lisbon, and were four and one year old when the family moved back to the states. JoAnn taught literature and composition for University of South Florida and Kentucky Wesleyan College. Adrian, her eldest son, was born in Henderson, KY.

A lifelong supporter of libraries, JoAnn was selected as Research Fellow in Library Science at Indiana University, earning an MLS in 1989. From 1990 to 2001, she worked as a librarian and teacher trainer in technology, writing grants to bring artists, poets and new technologies to her public school students in Delaware and Pennsylvania. In 2008, she completed an Ed.D. at the University of Delaware with a study on the myths of Internet plagiarism and high school writing instruction. She presented her findings at the 2009 National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) in Washington, DC.

Since 2008, JoAnn has served as Delaware’s poet laureate, appointed by Governor Ruth Ann Minner. She teaches poetry in schools, libraries and community centers across the state and advocates for poets-in-the-schools programming. She works with the Delaware Division of the Arts to bring poets and poetry to Delaware audiences, and to support Delaware’s poets and writers. In 2011 she worked with the DDOA and local arts organizations to launch The Delaware Regional Writers Conference and the Delaware Scholastic Writing Awards, part of a national recognition program for students in 7th through 12th grade. She coordinates the biennial Cape Henlopen Poets and Writers Retreat, sponsored by the Delaware Division of the Arts.

JoAnn is the author of Your Heart and How It Works (Spire Press, 2009), winner of the 2010 Global Filipino Literary Award; and Forage, (Wings Press, 2011), winner of the Whitebird Chapbook Prize. Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies such as the Best New Poets, DIAGRAM.2, Smartish Pace, MiPOesias, and on Verse Daily.

Other awards include induction into the Polk County Schools Hall of Fame in 2010 and fellowships from the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, the Delaware Division of the Arts, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

JoAnn lives in Northern DE with her husband and her youngest son, Julian, who is teaching her to read music, at last. She is at work on a series of life stories, new poems and a full-length poetry collection. She loves woodland trails, White Clay Creek, Florida’s panhandle, the creatures of Hofstetter Pond, and surfing.