Joanna Streetly was born in Trinidad, W.I., and educated in England. She came to Vancouver to study Outdoor Recreation and Wilderness Leadership and moved to the West Coast of Vancouver Island in 1990. For seven years she was married to a Tla-o-qui-aht canoe carver, and forged many links to the local First Nations community. Her first novel, Silent Inlet (Oolichan, 2005), was followed by Paddling Through Time (Raincoast Books). She now lives on a floathouse in the Tofino harbour with her partner, Marcel, and daughter, Toby, and she works in Clayoquot Sound as a naturalist guide and sea kayak instructor. Streetly is also a frequent participant in poetry performance groups including such as The Diversity Project and Performance Anxiety.

Streetly became the inaugural Tofino Poet Laureate in 2018, having recently published a volume of poetry, This Dark (Postelsia Press), and a newly published memoir, Wild Fierce Life: Dangerous Moments on the Outer Coast (Caitlin Press). Her goals as Poet Laureate included poetry submissions to Hearing Range, a project that looks at the intrusion of artificial, man-made sounds into the Clayoquot area. Also, for the 2019 Pacific Rim Art Society's Cultural Heritage Festival, she encouraged students will collect stories from local elders and histories to produce original poetry.

[See review]

[BCBW 2018] "Fiction"