M.J. Iuppa
M.J. Iuppa lives on a small farm near the shores of Lake Ontario. Her most recent poems have appeared in Poetry East, The Chariton Review, Tar River Poetry, Blueline, The Prose Poem Project, and The Centrifugal Eye, among others.
Recent chapbook As the Crows Flies (Foothills Publishing, 2008) and a second full-length collection, Within Reach by Cherry Grove Collections, 2010. A forthcoming prose chapbook Between Worlds will soon be available from Foothills Publishing.
She is Writer-in-Residence and Director of the Visual and Performing Arts Minor program at St. John Fisher College, Rochester, NY. She's also the Flash Fiction editor for the Schuykill Valley Journal - her blogsite: (A)stray: One Poet's Conversation.
Update Passed away April 27, 2023: Mary Jo (MJ) Iuppa passed peacefully after a five-year battle with ovarian cancer. She died at home with family by her side.
MJ was born in Rochester, NY to Dr. Louis A. and Josephine Iuppa. The youngest of five children, she had two older sisters, Andrea and Karen, and two older brothers, Bruce and Robert. Growing up in the Rochester area, she lived on Knollwood Drive and Edgemere Drive as a child. MJ attended Sacred Heart Academy until it closed in 1968. She then transferred to Our Lady of Mercy.
She attended St. Bonaventure University and completed her BA in English Literature, Journalism and Media Studies at SUNY Empire State College in 1976.
In pursuit of her art and teaching career, she obtained her Master of Arts in Creative Writing from SUNY Brockport in 2000.
She followed her mentors, Judith Kitchen and Stan Rubin, and enrolled in Pacific Lutheran University to obtain her finishing degree, a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing in 2006.
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