Joan Joffe Hall learned to read at her kitchen table in New York City at age four while her mother's back was turned, and the next year taught the boy downstairs how to read. After further education at Vassar and Stanford, she taught for forty years, mostly at the University of Connecticut, where she had a joint appointment in English and Women's Studies, teaching literature, film, and creative writing. Joan Joffe Hall has published many collections of poetry and prose, including The Rift Zone (finalist for the William Carlos Williams Prize) and Alice James's Romance & Capitalism at the Movies (nominated for a Pulitzer Prize). Her work has appeared widely in journals including The Georgia Review, The Massachusetts Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Michigan Quarterly Review, and Minnesota Quarterly. She has just published In Angled Light: Selected Poems (Antrim House). She is married to the writer David Morse and lives in Storrs, Connecticut.

“Romance and Capitalism at the Movies is the testimony of a highly educated, deeply rooted, profoundly concerned woman, critical of her time and seeing beyond it.”
—The Beloit Poetry Journal

“I relish that the poems are spoken by a woman who is about to do something: tend the garden, go off to work, care for a child. That, I know, is not the sort of thing a man is supposed to say in public now about a woman, but I wanted to say it, knowing how much I would like to be described as a domestic poet myself…These poems give their insights generously to us.”
—Wendell Berry