Joanne McLaughlin was born in Philadelphia and grew up on a predominantly Irish Catholic rowhouse block in the city’s Oxford Circle neighborhood. Except her family was anything but Irish Catholic—don’t let her last name fool you. Joanne was raised in a five-adult, two-child household consisting of her immigrant Italian grandmother and that grandmother’s daughter (Joanne’s mother) and son (Joanne’s uncle) and their non-Italian spouses, Joanne and her cousin, who was just four months’ younger. Though Joanne can’t speak Italian well, she has been largely able to understand and read it since she was preschool-age (not that she went to preschool). She learned to read English, too, at about the same age.
Joanne officially began telling stories in second grade, creating a fan fiction superhero universe. Her first written story (at age 10) was a spy fan fiction mashup called The Centrovian Ship Affair, a copy of which turned up a few years back but has somehow vanished again. A voracious reader all through Catholic elementary school, Joanne went on to become editor of the newspaper at Little Flower Catholic High School for Girls. Though she wanted to be a doctor, advanced math made advanced science tricky, so at Penn State University Joanne switched to the trade she already seemed suited to: journalism.
It was a good move. Joanne has worked in public media and newspapers in Philadelphia and its suburbs, upstate New York, and northeastern Ohio, on coverage of topics ranging from politics and public health to fashion and financial markets, as well as Pulitzer Prize-finalist architecture criticism and a Peabody Award-nominated podcast on COVID vaccines.
During her years as an editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, Joanne learned the craft of fiction writing as a member of the city’s prestigious Rittenhouse Writers’ Group. Her published fiction includes the vampire trilogy Never Before Noon, Never Until Now, and Never More Human, as well as several short stories. Her mystery Chasing Ashes, coming in November, is Joanne’s first book with Celestial Echo Press.
Joanne’s nonfiction essays have appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer and on WHYY.org. She is a member of the writers group Sisters in Crime.
For several years, Joanne also was vice president of Never Before Noon Artist Management, representing blues musicians. (Yes, she named her first novel after the company.) She currently lives in Philadelphia, in a different rowhouse on the other side of the city that’s close to the son, daughter-in-law and granddaughters she adores. When she’s not writing, Joanne is tweaking the interior design of her home, walking regularly through a nearby arboretum, and, of course, reading.