Joanna’s love of books started when she was a child and she read prolifically. This led to studying English and eventually becoming an English teacher. As part of these studies, Joanna attended Eastern Michigan University where she studied American literature, leading to a fascination with F Scott Fitzgerald and a subsequent dissertation about his novels. She also studied for a year at the University of Oxford looking into the area of sex-sterotyping in children’s fiction and produced a dissertation and various publications about this issue.

Joanna has travelled extensively and has kept journals of some of her trips around the world. More recently she began to write blogs for ForCrohns, a charity she was involved in, now sadly no longer operational. She raised thousands of pounds for the charity to fund research into Crohns Disease, which she has suffered with since her mid-twenties, organising fund raising events and undertaking challenges in different parts of the world.  She wrote these blogs with the intention of encouraging and inspiring people with disabilities to believe that it is still possible to travel to remote locations.  An edited version of one of her blogs was published recently in a magazine summarised recently in a magazine “Disruptive Authors”.

In 2022 Joanna decided to record the experiences of people she had met around the world during the pandemic, which resulted in the publication of her first book, Lockdown Stories. Her second book is due to be published by The Book Guild in May 2025. It is called “Gutsy Travels. Travelling the World with my Invisible Friend”