JoAnn Balingit of Delaware, Poet and Writer

I am a poet, teacher and arts-in-education advocate, and have taught creative writing classes at the University of Delaware, Delaware Public Libraries and Delaware Division of the Arts writing retreats. As state coordinator for Delaware’s Poetry Out Loud program I also teach poetry writing and recitation in schools and community centers.

My full-length collection of poems, Words for House Story (WordTech Editions 2013) was a 2015 Best Books selection at Beltway Poetry  I have two chapbooks, Forage (2011), winner of the Whitebird Chapbook Prize, and Your Heart and How It Works (2009), awarded the Global Filipino Literary Award.

I have been fortunate to find writing community through a writing residency at Hedgebrook, and through VONA/Voices of Our Nations as a 2017 Resident in Prose. I held three fellowships at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts  as a Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Creative Fellow, and I am grateful for a 2014 Bread Loaf Bakeless Camargo Foundation Fellowship which allowed me to work on family stories that are part of my memoir-in-progress. This memoir project was my focus at Hedgebrook in April 2019. It’s a story of surviving family violence and coming to terms with intergenerational trauma, my mixed-race identity and my parents’ secrets.

I grew up in Lakeland, Florida, where my Filipino father and German American mother settled our big family after many moves. For the past 25 years I have lived in the woods of northern Delaware. I like road trips, hiking, gardening native plants, surfing, drunken noodles, libraries, and hanging out with family– especially my kids and granddaughter.

Visit JoAnn Balingit at her website http://joannbalingit.org/ to find out more and contact her from there. She does classroom visits and her poetry is awesome—and I’m not into poetry so that says something.