Joan Cusack Handler is a poet, memoirist, and psychologist whose poems have been widely published in over 40 literary journals and received awards from The Boston Review and five Pushcart nominations. Founder and publisher of CavanKerry Press Ltd, she is the blogger for Psychology Today. Com’s feature ‘Of Science & Art’.

She has five published books: her first poetry collection, GlOrious, an anthem to adolescent rebellion in adulthood; the second, The Red Canoe: Love in Its Making, a verse memoir, explores the anatomy of a marriage–underbelly and crown; her third, Confessions of Joan the Tall, is a prose memoir written in the voice of her 11 year old self—a very tall, Irish Catholic girl living in the Bronx in the 1950s. Her fourth book, Orphans, also a verse memoir, recounts the stories of her colorful Irish immigrant parents and her complicated relationship with them. Following that is Places We Return To, an anthology of poems and prose pieces from the first one hundred books published by CavanKerry Press—the press she founded over 25 years ago and co-edited with poet Gabriel Cleveland. Finally, we have Lights in Cold Rooms, A Psychologist Reflects on Family, Aging, Love & Loss.

A Bronx native who lives now in Brooklyn, NY and East Hampton, NY, is married to a great man and fellow psychologist, has a loving son, David, a violinist and composer who together with his two daughters, Cassidy Vaughn and Elodie Rush, our amazing granddaughters, infuses our lives with more joy than we ever thought possible.