Her lifelong interest in music as well as words led to her first full-length poetry collection, Twenty Four Preludes and Fugues on Dmitri Shostakovich (Arc Publications), which was shortlisted for the Forward First Collection Prize in 2007. She is a Hawthornden Fellow, and has received a Tyrone Guthrie Fellowship and a Northern Promise Award, from Northern Arts and New Writing North respectively. Joanna read English, Latin and Music at the University of London, and later gained a distinction at MA in Writing Poetry at Newcastle University.