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Life
1942- [née Watton]; b. Tandragee; ed. QUB; participated in Belfast Group, under tutelage of Seamus Heaney and Michael Allen; issued First Letters Home (1965), poetry; m. and settled in Dromore, Co. Down, working as schoolteacher; separated from her husband; settled at Ballycastle with her dg. Kate Newmann; completed MPhil. at UUC; issued several poetry collections incl. Circumcision (1994), pamphlet; Coming of Age (1995); appeared at Bangor Heritage Celebration of Irish Writers, 1994; Thin Ice (1998), poetry; currently lives in Donegal; co-publisher of Summer Palace Press with her dg. Kate [q.v.], a poetry press based at Whitehead, Co. Antrim.
Works
First Letters Home (QUB Fest. 1965), pamph.; Circumcision (Belfast: Honest Ulsterman 1994), pamphlet; Coming of Age (Belfast: Blackstaff Press 1995), 72pp.; Thin Ice (Newry: Abbey Press 1998), 28pp. [ltd. edn. 1,000]; with Kate Newmann, Belongings (Dublin: Arlen House 2007), 160pp.
Also “Inga”, “Van Morrison on the Heartstrings”, “Ruby”, in Causeway, 1, 1 (Autumn 1993), pp.4, 52 [as infra].
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Criticism
Christine St. Peter, ‘In Conversation with Joan and Kate Newmann: Irish Poets and Publishers’, in Canadian Journal of Irish Studies/Revue canadienne d’études irlandaises, Vol. 28, No.2 (Fall 2002/Vol. 29 No.1 (Spring 2003), pp.148-53.
Notes
“Inga”, in Causeway, 1 (Autumn 1993): as with Hewitt’s “This is my Country”, epigraphing the editorial, the theme of this piece is a family’s arrival in an unfamiliar yet possessive region [Ulster]; Newmann contribs. other poems to pages of this issue.
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