Poet and novelist Joanna C. Scott came to Australia as a child. She took her first degree from the University of Adelaide, tutored at the University of Western Australia and then moved to the USA where she took a post-graduate degree at Duke University, North Carolina.
In the 1980s Scott went to live in Manila where her husband was ambassador to the Asian Development Bank. There she wrote her first book, Indochina's Refugees: Oral Histories from Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam (1989), taping interviews while sitting in the dust at the refugee camp in Bataan. After adopting three Korean orphans, she and her husband returned to the USA.
In 1997 'New Jerusalem', a collection of Scott's poems set in Australia, won the American Capricorn Poetry Award for a manuscript collection. Scott has won numerous other American literary awards, including the Longleaf Poetry Award and the Acorn-Rukeyser Award, the Americas Review Prize for Social Poetry, the PEN/Nob Hill Poetry Award, and the New England Prize for Poetry.
