Joan Baranow is the author of six poetry collections, including Reading Szymborska in a Time of Plague, winner of the 2021 Brick Road Press contest. Her poems have appeared in Zyzzyva, The Paris Review, The Gettysburg Review, Poetry East, Spillway, and elsewhere. A VCCA fellow and member of the Community of Writers, she founded and teaches in the Low-Residency MFA program in Creative Writing at Dominican University of CA. With her husband David Watts, she produced the PBS documentary Healing Words: Poetry & Medicine (2008). Her feature-length documentary, The Time We Have (2018), presents an intimate portrait of a young woman facing terminal illness.