Joanna emigrated to Canada from the UK and continues to maintain a number of connections there; there has been interest for festivals there to have her over in the new year to promote Endlings.
She has already been invited to the South Downs Poetry Festival (UK), summer 2020, Wild Words North, northern BC, September 2020, and The Bakehouse, Scotland (2020 if timing works out)

"Specimen" was the winning entry for the 2019 Planet in Peril Poetry Competition.

Joanna Lilley has lived north of the 60th parallel in Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada, since she emigrated from the UK in 2006. Her poetry collection, The Fleece Era, was published by Brick Books in 2014 and her short fiction collection, The Birthday Books, will be published by Hagios Press in their Strike Fire New Author Series in 2015. Joanna's poems and stories have been published in journals and anthologies in Canada, the US and the UK, including The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, Grain, The Fiddlehead and The Antigonish Review. Her awards include first prize in the 2005 Lothian Life poetry contest and first prize in the 2004 Worldwise regional creative writing competition. Joanna has a MLitt degree in creative writing from the universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde and is a Humber School for Writers graduate. In 2011 and 2013, she received Advanced Artist Awards from the Government of Yukon. With diplomas in plain language editing and journalism, Joanna earns her living as a public sector communications professional.

Joanna Lilley's profile page

• Winner, Planet in Peril Poetry Competition

Endlings moved and changed me. A catalogue of extinctions, these poems ask whether the past must be the future. Through tributes and testaments, through voices animal and avian and human, through irony, despair, humour, and hope, Joanna Lilley’s clear vision and assured craft affirm that it’s too late for the passenger pigeon, nearly for the Northern white rhinoceros, but not for the living and not for art. 'Perhaps we can augment / our aptitude for wonder,' Lilley ventures. In honouring the lost, these poems invite and sometimes command us to attend and to mourn. To embrace their wonder is to commit to living differently.

Stephanie Bolster

In Endlings Joanna Lilley offers a kind of history from the voice of extinct and extant animals, and from the observer’s omniscient lens. In these poems we are reminded that “not every death converts to crystal”. We watch a paleontologist with two vertebrae, and a boy who shoots the last Labrador Duck out of hunger. We watch as hunters shoot a rare cross-bred bear with a kind of appalled and implicated curiosity. Moving from narrative to lyrical poems, Joanna Lilley gives us the mythology of lost creatures and shows how easily we make myth from what once lived. We are condemned by the dodo’s damning account, by the Last Labrador Duck’s bitter meat. Condemned by loss: the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker and the things that have died without us even knowing. Careful where you step or sit or eat: “the last one died between the human wars. You may have sat on it...”

How write of so many known and unknown creatures without falling off the plank into a pit of sentimentality? Lilley does this through rawness, research, and honesty. These are poems of close study. Instead of the poems teetering into sentiment, we humans balance precariously on the raw wood that is the Anthropocene and the view is not good from this burning beam. How to write? Take your own skeleton and draw it in so that you are Megatherium and your bones echo this history, restless in drawered in a museum

Yvonne Blomer is the author of As if a Raven and editor of Refugium: Poems for the Pacific and Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds.

We are so disconnected from nature we think it’s the economy that makes our lifestyles and lives possible. In fact it’s the complex web of nature within which we are inextricably linked and on which we are utterly dependent.

When a species disappears, that complex web of life loses resilience and productivity. This book is a reminder of what we have lost within human memory. It’s a frightening reminder that Nature is our Mother and source of life.

David Suzuki