About JoAnn

For a brief period of time in college, I had a reputation in my dorm for being “ice-cold.” The reason for this, I was told, was that people who’d never tried speaking to me thought I was standoffish because I never spoke to them. This was mainly because I didn’t consider myself particularly interesting – hence my desire to write fiction. Unless I am, at some future date, kidnapped and held for ransom by a celebrity while battling a fatal disease, you’ll not likely ever be reading my memoirs. Not even James Frey-style memoirs, which are almost as fictional as my novels.

I started out with a journalism degree from Penn State, before sadly realizing (and spending many tuition dollars) that I wasn’t terribly fond of talking to strangers – a tough handicap for a reporter. So I completed another degree in Russian and continued on to graduate school at the University of Virginia for a degree in Slavic Linguistics.

For anyone in total denial about wanting a life of writing, being in a Slavic Department should be enough to bring you out of the closet. As an undergraduate reading Dostoevsky and Gogol, Aksyonov and Solzhenitsyn, I couldn’t help but crack open the closet door, even though I wasn’t a literature student. Later, in graduate school, I discovered Slavic writers outside the usual Russian suspects, such as Ivo Andrić, Milorad Pavić, Ivan Klíma, Milan Kundera (not a great favorite of mine, but The Joke is still a classic for me). My favorite novel is Death and the Dervish, by Meša Selimović (I’ll likely blog about it at some point, rather than try to describe it here – for now I’ll say only that it is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever read).

While in grad school reading the Slavs, I had the fortune to be living in Charlottesville, VA – home to several good second-hand bookstores. If reading Russian masters like Dostoevsky, Gogol and Pushkin had opened me up to the short story form, then collecting cheap, used copies of the O. Henry and Best American Short Stories compilations showed me variations on what could be done with them. When I think about some of the more recent writers who most affect me – George Saunders, Alice Munro, Lorrie Moore, David Foster Wallace, JM Coetzee – all but the last are either primarily or to a great extent short story writers. I also became addicted during that time to Kafka, Marquez and Borges, three writers who are examples for me of what writing is all about. Here are a links to a couple of my earlier short works:
http://www.pindeldyboz.com/jwbaudelaire.htm
http://www.ghotimag.com/Archives/Issue%207/Welsh.htm

As for mystery writers, the authors I’ve read over and over are Martha Grimes, Sue Grafton, Sara Paretsky, the early Scarpetta novels of Patricia Cornwell and the Hercule Poirot stories of Agatha Christie. I’ll talk more about them in my blog.

As for the personal, I live in Rochester, NY with my husband David, who designed this website, as well as the cover and book design for Faith, and is a published writer himself. We have two daughters, three cats and a ninja monkey.