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, where she wrote a dissertation that focused on English Renaissance complaint poetry. She is the recipient of writing fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is an assistant professor in the English department at Illinois Wesleyan University.

Other poems by Joanne Diaz in Verse Daily:

Books by Joanne Diaz:

Other poems on the web by Joanne Diaz:
"Thank You, Brian Williams"

Joanne Diaz's Home Page.

About The Lessons:

"The Lessons is driven by the poet’s passion for natural history, for the marvels and horrors of science, for the people closest to her, and, in every way, by music. The risks Diaz takes in this beautiful first book are the profound risks of art and of love."
—Gail Mazur

"Excitedly descriptive, sinuously rhythmical, and vividly perceptive, Joanne Diaz's poems 'wring the roots of thought' and fill the mind's eye with scenes of the paradoxically sensuous richness of longing--homesickness, sorrow, love. In this book, 'desire' is not just an erotic longing but an existential one; that is, it is our capacity and hunger for meaning."
—Reginald Gibbons

"In this first collection of poems by Joanne Diaz, the world of made things (violins, domesticated dogs, children, syringes) ache and echo back to the wild and troubled sources from whence they came. And between the source and the made thing lies a pattern (and a fine musical friction among the words) that Diaz has arranged with a deft hand. These poems are fraught with mortality. Her knowledge that 'everyone must die a little' is subtly both terrible and beautiful."
—John Poch