Joan Uda

Joan Uda was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in July 1939, at the Booth Memorial Home for unwed mothers. She knows very little about her birth mother, who died before Joan began searching for her in 1992. At 3 months of age, Joan was adopted by an exceptional couple who reared her with great love and generosity.

Joan began writing stories when she was barely able to hold a pencil. Her very first story was about an Indian princess who lost her intended husband when he went on a hunting party, and whose copious tears turned into water lily pads.

At the age of 13 Joan was assaulted by an adult male, and as a result she became pregnant. Her parents drove her to the very same Booth Hospital where she had been born, and there she stayed until she gave birth. The experiences of her months at Booth gave rise to her novel, Booth Girls, A Love Story.

Joan was never graduated from high school but was tested into college directly from 11th grade in 1956, to Cornell College in Iowa, where she stayed for a year and a half. Transferring to North Central College in Naperville, Illinois, she received her BA in 1959. She began her professional life as a teacher of English and American history in public school. She then earned a Master's of Fine Arts in Writing from the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop, where she met her husband Lowell Masato Uda. After both were graduated, Joan and Lowell moved to Hawai'i, Lowell's home state, with their four children, where Joan taught and worked as a teacher and curriculum developer at the U. of Hawai'i.

When the family returned to the mainland, Joan attended law school at the University of Montana, and practiced law in federal and state courts. Later she answered her childhood call to ministry, attended Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado, was ordained a United Methodist minister and served as pastor for several UM churches in Colorado.

In the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Joan's professor commended her for her writing, calling it "deceptively simple" so that the reader needed to plunge beneath the surface in order to understand. Again in graduate school, her teacher, Kurt Vonnegut, author of Cat's Cradle, Mother Night, and others, wrote her a note about her novel Booth Girls, saying, "This is terrific, but as far as publishing it, you might as well send the publishers a gold brick with the word f--- printed on it. It's ahead of its time."

For more than eleven years Joan wrote several other books and a popular weekly column for various newspapers. Now a widow, she lives in Montana near some of her children and grandchildren.

Joan especially enjoys her family, loves dogs and cats but is allergic to cats. Thus her companion animals have always been truly adorable dogs, always with Hawaiian names such as Lili'uokalani, Kamalani and Akamai. She is a passionate reader as well as writer and savors both well-written fiction and non-fiction. Before moving to an apartment in recent years, Joan was a fervent gardener, tending vegetables, fruits, and flowers, and keeping notes on all her plants. She owns a 1950 Singer sewing machine which still sews the best straight seam she's ever seen, and she appreciates doing other needlework such as embroidery, needlepoint and knitting.