Joanne Merriam was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada in 1973. A graduate in English and Mathematics from Dalhousie University, she has worked as a courier dispatcher, telemarketer, charity fundraiser, sheet music librarian, Medicaid claim sorter, check composition specialist, web designer and office administrator. Her work has appeared in dozens of periodicals, including The Antigonish Review, Chiaroscuro, The Fiddlehead, Grain, The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, Room of One's Own and Vallum Contemporary Poetry, as well as in the anthologies Best of Strange Horizons 2, Ice: new writing on hockey, Reactions 4, To Find Us: Words and Images of Halifax and The Allotment: New Lyric Poets. A complete list is here. In 2004, she immigrated to the USA and spent two years in Tennessee; she now lives in Concord, NH.

In 2001, she quit her job as the Executive Assistant of the Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia to travel Canada by train, and then much of the Northeastern and Southern United States with her husband Alan Slone. Her first book of poetry (now out of print), The Glaze from Breaking (Stride, 2005), was written about those travels.