About Joan Landis
Joan Hutton Landis was born in Morristown, New Jersey. She majored in English at Bennington College, where she studied poetry with Stanley Kunitz, Howard Nemerov, and Ben Belitt.
After working in publishing, she married Kendall Landis and lived in Paris, Jeddah, Beirut, and Casa Blanca. During those years she wrote and published poetry and was active in theater. Returning to the States in 1967, with her husband and three sons, Landis studied poetry with Richard Wilbur at Wesleyan University, where she earned her masters degree. During that period her work was published in small journals, as well as in the Transatlantic Review and the New York Times.
Landis continued her education, earning a Ph.D. at Bryn Mawr. She was awarded a Danforth Graduate Fellowship for Women. Her articles on Shakespeare were published in Hamlet Studies, The Upstart Crow and the Shakespeare Quarterly, among others. Her reviews of the poetry of Louise Gluck, Ben Belitt, and John Peck appeared in Salmagundi.
In 1977 Landis began teaching at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, helping to form the core curriculum, initiating both poetry and fiction workshops and becoming the first Chair of the Liberal Arts Department. She participated in Frank Bidart’s poetry workshops at the New York Summer Writers’ Institute in Saratoga Springs, where she was encouraged to work on the manuscript that eventually became That Blue Repair.
Landis’s most recent poetry has appeared in Parnassus: Poetry in Review, The Gettysburg Review, Poetry and Salmagundi.
