Joanne Merriam was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada in 1973. A graduate in English and Mathematics from Dalhousie University, she has worked as an oil and gas lease and title administrator, courier dispatcher, telemarketer, charity fundraiser, sheet music librarian, Medicaid claim sorter, check composition specialist, disability and workers’ compensation administrator and web designer.

In 2001, she quit her job as the Executive Assistant of the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia to travel Canada by train, and then parts 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, in part, about those travels.

In 2004, she immigrated to the USA. She has lived in Tennessee, Kentucky and New Hampshire; she now resides in Nashville, Tennessee.

Joanne Merriam’s poetry and fiction has appeared in dozens of magazines and journals, including The Antigonish Review, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Astropoetica, Chiaroscuro, The Fiddlehead, Grain, The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, Riddle Fence, Room of One’s Own, Strange Horizons and Vallum Contemporary Poetry, as well as in the anthologies Ice: new writing on hockey, To Find Us: Words and Images of Halifax and The Allotment: New Lyric Poets.

She can be reached at joannemerriam@gmail.com.