Joan Mas was the third daughter of a family of four girls. Her father was of Welsh descent and her mother of German-Jewish parentage. She received a public school education and completed her secondary schooling in the depression. In the mid-1940s she married Raymond Mas, a Spanish businessman who died in 1957. They had one son, Phillip.
Mas never took a literature course, but was an avid reader and started writing poetry early. She felt a deep affinity with Emily Bronte and Wuthering Heights was her most read book. Emily Dickinson, Katherine Mansfield and Rabindranath Tagore also had a deep impact on her. Her poems were published in all the leading Australian newspapers, several Australian journals and some anthologies, as well as overseas. Mas published two books of poems and was co-editor, with Roland Robinson (q.v.), of Poetry Magazine in 1969-1970, and a freelance writer for the ABC.
In 1974 Joan Mas received a Special Grant from the Australian Literature Board in recognition of her work. In the same year, while on a visit to her mother in Queensland, she died by drowning.
