Award-winning poet Joan Kantor lives with her husband in the charming village of Collinsville, Connecticut.  Joan’s training is in both education and marriage and family therapy and she works at Manchester Community College as a counselor and learning disabilities specialist.  She actively promotes poetry in the community and has served as a featured reader for the public television series Speaking of Poetry as well as for several art museums; additionally, she leads workshops, has mentored for Poetry Out Loud, and judged and mentored for the Hill-Stead Museum’s Sunken Garden Poetry Festival Fresh Voices Poetry Program. To fulfill her inclusive vision of the arts, Joan collaborates with both visual artists and musicians and currently performs in Stringing Words Together, an interactive performance of poetry and music.

Kantor’s first published collection, Shadow Sounds, was a finalist for the Foreword Reviews Book of the Year Award in 2010. Her poetry has also been included in numerous literary journals, and in 2014, she won first prize in the Hackney Literary Awards poetry contest