Sept 2024: Thrilled to be a Fall 2024/Winter 2025 MacDowell Fellow.
May 2024: Honored to have been named the South Arts North Carolina Fellow for Literary Arts
April 2024: Grateful and honored to receive the 2024 Alison Lurie Memorial Fellowship to VCCA!
Mar. 2023: Excited to share this news. Debut novel coming in 2024 with Bloomsbury!
Jan. 2023: Appreciate this lovely review of NOW YOU KNOW IT ALL in Our State magazine!
Dec. 2022: Very grateful to have been named a recipient of a 2023 NC Artist Support Grant from the North Carolina Arts Council, a division of the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Durham Arts Council, local grants administrator. Thank you, NC Arts Council and Durham Arts Council!
Aug. 2022: NOW YOU KNOW IT ALL has been named one of three fiction finalists for the Library of Virginia Awards!! (Check out this Virginia Literary Awards Fiction Panel with Jocelyn Nicole Johnson and Sheri Reynolds.)
May 2022: Grateful for kind reviews of NOW YOU KNOW IT ALL in The Colorado Review and in the Omnivorous Reader section of both O’Henry Magazine and Pinestraw Magazine.
Feb. 2022: Another nice review of NOW YOU KNOW IT ALL in The Adroit Journal.
Jan. 2022: Wonderful conversation with Julia Ridley Smith via Malaprop’s Bookstore. Also, thoroughly enjoyed this visit to Duke University as part of the David L. Paletz Creative Writing Guest Series.
Dec. 2021: Grateful for some very nice reviews of NOW YOU KNOW IT ALL!! Check them out: Publishers Weekly, The Rumpus, Southern Review of Books, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Pittsburgh Quarterly.
Oct. 2021: Super fun reading and conversation about NOW YOU KNOW IT ALL with Michael McFee and JP Gritton at the wonderful Flyleaf Books. You can watch the recording! Also, had a great online event with the fabulous Clare Beams through Pittsburgh’s City of Asylum.
Apr. 2021: A second edition of OLDEST MORTAL MYTH is now available through Red Hen Press. The new edition is available in both paperback and hardback from Bookshop, Amazon, and Red Hen Press.
Feb. 2021: Delighted to learn that series editor Steph Cha and guest editor Alafair Burke have selected “Mr. Forble” (originally published in Salamander) for The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2021, forthcoming in October 2021!
Dec. 2020: “Joanna Pearson of Carrboro, North Carolina is the 2021 winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, one of the nation’s most prestigious awards for a collection of short stories. Pearson’s Now You Know It All was selected by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward P. Jones. The University of Pittsburgh Press will publish Pearson’s collection in October 2021….” Read full press release HERE….