Jo Pitkin

Bio

Jo Pitkin is the author of a chapbook, The Measure, and four full-length poetry collections—Cradle of the American Circus: Poems from Somers, New York; Commonplace Invasions; Rendering; and Village: Recession (forthcoming in 2020). She is also the editor of the anthology Lost Orchard: Prose and Poetry from the Kirkland College Community (SUNY Press, 2014). Her award-winning poems have been published in The New York Review of Books, Little Star, Nimrod International Journal, Quarterly West, Crab Orchard Review, Terrain, Salamander, Southern Humanities Review, Stone Canoe, A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley, Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace, and many other journals and anthologies. Jo earned a BA in Creative Writing and Literature from Kirkland College—one of the first undergraduate creative writing programs in the United States—and an MFA in poetry from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. She lives in the Hudson Valley, where she works as a teaching artist for the Poetry Barn and as a freelance educational writer. She is the credited author of more than forty books for Kindergarten through Grade 12 students, including Bill Pickett: Rodeo King and Stargazers: Astronomy in Ancient Times. She is a master of creating grade-level reading passages, instructional lessons, and multiple-choice assessment questions that hit state and Common Core standards.