User:Jabalingit

JoAnn Balingit was born in Columbus, Ohio and raised in Lakeland, Florida. She was educated at The University of California, Irvine and Indiana University. She holds a Doctorate in Education from the University of Delaware. The third eldest of twelve children, Balingit is a first-generation Filipina American whose father immigrated from The Philippines in 1929, and met her mother, a Midwesterner of German heritage, in 1951. JoAnn Balingit is the author of Your Heart and How It Works (Spire Press, 2009), winner of the 2010 Global Filipino Literary Award in poetry, and Forage (2011), awarded the Whitebird Chapbook Prize from Wings Press. Her work has been honored by fellowships from the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, the Delaware Division of the Arts, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She was appointed Delaware’s poet laureate in 2008, and inducted into Polk County (FL) Schools Hall of Fame in 2010. Her poems have appeared on Verse Daily, in DIAGRAM, MiPOesias, Harpur Palate, Lantern Review, Smartish Pace and elsewhere including the anthologies Best New Poets 2007 and Voices of the Asian American and Pacific Islander Experience (ABC-CLIO, 2012). Her poetry is featured in issue 35 of Our Own Voice.