Author Joanna Lee is taking on the mantle of Richmond’s official poet laureate. (Photo by Elizabeth Collins)
Richmond is lovely through the eyes of poet Joanna Lee. “Your daffodils unfold in the median just beyond the magnolia’s shadow, yellow suns against a cobblestone slick with pink petals that follow the rain.”
This excerpt was taken from her poem, “Open Letter to the City,” recently commissioned and performed by the Richmond Symphony and Richmond Symphony Chorus.
While Lee became Richmond’s official poet laureate in April, she’s been penning love letters to the city for well over a decade.
A Winchester native, she moved to Richmond, where she graduated from the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine prior to obtaining a Ph.D. from William & Mary. During the throes of her rigorous academic program, her mother suddenly fell ill, and she found herself taking a step back and questioning her career. “After my mom passed, I was going through stuff at my dad’s house and found a poem that my mom had written for me — that I had never seen — asking me why I never played to my strengths in language and writing,” Lee recalls. “It seemed very coincidental, like all the signs were pointing for me to take a hard left and do something else.”
So, she walked away from a career in medicine and returned to Richmond, where she felt drawn to the James River. “I wanted to capture the wildness of the river and how it juxtaposed with the city,” she says. “It became the foundation of where I went with my writing, my art and where I am now — which is not any place I thought I would be.”
Her poetry began to flow, and she started bringing other artists together in what would become the River City Poets. The group started with five or six people in 2011 and has grown to a following of 500 to 600 poets and poetry fans. “We need that community just to battle the self-doubt and fears that you have as a writer when you get locked away inside your own work,” Lee says. “Taking that first step into publishing or performing feels like this huge, gigantic, insurmountable thing. It’s important to know you’re not alone in the struggle.”
Lee and her husband also co-own Café Zata in Manchester, where they often host poetry readings and open mic nights. Lee encourages new poets to come out and listen until they’re ready to take the stage.
During her tenure as poet laureate, she hopes to write a full collection of work. “I’d like to do something that highlights the natural bounty we have here in Richmond with the James River and the park system, how we interact with that as creatives, and how it shapes our voices,” she says.
She also hopes to influence future generations in connecting with the natural world and preserving it. She recently contributed to “Writing the Land: Virginia,” an anthology of poetry and a website that raises funds for the Capital Region Land Conservancy.
Former librarian Patty Parks founded Richmond’s poet laureate program in 2020 to provide emotional and spiritual support during the pandemic. The U.S. program was established in 1985 to cultivate a national appreciation of poetry.
“There’s so much going on in the world, and poetry offers a contrast to that heaviness,” Lee says. “We should never lose sight of those things that inspire us.”
