Who is Joanna McKethan?

Somebody “different,” as her classmates liked to tell her. That’s okay, because she always wanted to be unique. And her friends tell her she acts and thinks young. She certainly friends the young.

An Artist! An award-winning one with two signature statuses after her name who exhibits regionally and nationally. Gordon Wetmore, former President and a founding member of Portrait Society of America, told artists to thank God every morning they woke that they had the privilege of being an artist and of going to work that day doing what they loved most.

A Gothic Romance Writer and an Indie eBook Author! With three books on Amazon now, and a fourth one soon to be released, she is grateful to be perched where her books full of espionage, heroines in distress, and secret societies seeking to take over the world, and in love struggles of the century, will take off big time!

An Art Teacher who has taught 30+ years to 2000+ students, developing them as artists.  With Old Masters training in Germany both in watercolor and in oil painting, she teaches atelier skills on the master level and to regular art studio students, private and small class, locally, and eventually, on Skype.

A Shop/Studio Owner. Says the artist-author, “As long as I can remember, all I have ever wanted to do was write and paint. My trek to feel accomplished at this has been arduous, leading me to jobs that would enable my first loves, learning from courses, reading, and experimentation and to occupying small, cramped quarters, and making seven moves downtown before finally finding and co-owning  a site with my son where this could become a daily delight. For that is exactly what I do at 217 East Broad Street,” she says, and from the looks of it, every inch is dedicated to fulfilling this passion and love.

A former assistant editor and information specialist. Joanna worked four years at the University of Kentucky’s Cooperative Extension Service as an editor, first of programs, then of home economics bulletins, then as EFNEP-dedicated specialist. She was the West Information Specialist for Universal Verlag in Starnberg, Germany, a publishing company where she wrote feature stories based on interviews.

A poet with hundreds of poems written and over 60 published in literary journals and anthologies. She won close to $1000 for one poem in Writer’s Digest’s 72nd Annual Writing Competition, First Place Unrhymed Poetry. She has won other top prizes like Crucible’s Sam Ragan Prize and their 1st Place.

What does she hope to leave as her legacy?   Her focus, she would say, is  the beauty and integrity of the single human soul, the one-of-a-kind, intense moment of wonder, and the world as it was created. To quote the author-artist, “I want to join senses, intellect, and spirit. I want to inspire and elevate and change the world–big goals in little pieces of art done for you, the treasured person who wandered into my world.”