Joanna Pearson grew up in the actual Livermush Capital of the World – Shelby, North Carolina – but thankfully she never had to compete in a Miss Livermush pageant! She received both her medical degree and a Master’s in Fine Arts from Johns Hopkins University, and is currently completing her residency in psychiatry in Baltimore, Maryland. Her poetry and essays have appeared in The New York Times “Modern Love” column, the Journal of the American Medical Association, StorySouth, and the Bellevue Literary Review, among other publications.