About the Author
As a child Joanna Rose lived in New Jersey, Iowa, and Michigan, often moving from town to town, suburb to suburb, never staying anywhere for long until her family landed in Flint Michigan when she was 13. She continued the wandering when she left home. Capitol Hill in Denver was the setting of her first novel, Little Miss Strange. She found she loved cities, with the big old houses that reminded her of her grandmother’s homes in Roselle, New Jersey. There was a brief stay in Boulder, and a time high in the Rockies in the tiny town of Frisco. She got her first dog there, a hound dog puppy named Bullfrog, whom she renamed Frisco, and together they hitchhiked back and forth across the country and Canada. She discovered a spiritual affinity with the Pacific northwest when she ended up on the wild west coast of Vancouver Island in Tofino, then no more than a little village. She fell in love with rain. She finally landed in Portland Oregon. Even then she moved from one city neighborhood to another ten times in 20 years. She has since had six dogs.
She always thought of New Jersey as the answer to the question Where are you from, since there were relatives there: a beloved grandmother, the cherished Aunt Mimi, and many cousins, most of whom she has never met. She has no solid connection to any of the places she lived before landing in Portland.
Rootlessness, restlessness, tenuous family ties, and the spirituality of the natural world, particularly the Pacific northwest, inform her work. She hopes to end up living at the coast someday but still loves city life. And dogs. There is always a dog somewhere.