Photo by Mari Griffith
Jo Balistreri (born Maryjo Horton, 1941, Duluth, Minnesota, U.S.A.), concert pianist, harpsichordist, educator, and poet. She spent more than a decade as a docent and educator at Ten Chimneys, Wisconsin, the summer retreat of theater greats Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. The author of three books of poetry, Balistreri began studying haiku in 2015 and is currently completing her first full-length haiku manuscript. Her work has been included in the members’ anthologies of the British Haiku Society, the Haiku Society of America, and the Waukesha Haiku Group; in Robert Epstein’s All the Way Home: Aging in Haiku; in Gabriel Sawicki’s Behind the Tree Line; and in A New Resonance 12. She has been spotlighted in The Haiku Foundation’s New to Haiku: Advice for Beginners, Jacob Salzer’s Haiku Poet Interview, the Pan Haiku Review feature “Startled into Flight: Mary Jo Balistreri,” and in an interview by Sangita Kalarickal on the Drifting Sands YouTube podcast. Balistrieri lives in Waukesha, Wisconsin.
Note: This is an abstract of a longer biographical article to come.