Joan Larkin earned a Bachelor of Arts at Swarthmore College, a Master of Arts in English at the University of Arizona, and a Master of Fine Arts in playwriting at Brooklyn College.

Larkin has served on the faculties of Brooklyn College, Sarah Lawrence College, and Goddard College, and as Distinguished Visiting Poet at Columbia College Chicago. She is a member of the core faculty of the Master of Fine Arts Program in Poetry Writing at Drew University.

Joan Larkin's most recent poetry collection is My Body: New and Selected Poems (Hanging Loose Press, 2007). Previous books of poetry include Housework, A Long Sound, Sor Juana's Love Poems (translated with Jaime Manrique), and Cold River.

Her writing includes The Hole in the Sheet, a Klezmer musical farce, and two books of daily meditations in the Hazelden recovery series: If You Want What We Have and Glad Day. The Living, her verse play about AIDS, has been produced at festivals in Boston and New York.

Joan Larkin's most recent award is the Publishing Triangle's 2008 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, for her book My Body: New and Selected Poems. In addition, Joan Larkin has received the Lambda Literary Award for poetry twice, in 1988 (for Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time, with Carl Morse) and in 1997 (for Cold River). In the 1970s, she co-founded the independent small press Out & Out Books and co-edited the anthologies Amazon Poetry and Lesbian Poetry (with Elly Bulkin). Her anthology of coming out stories, A Woman Like That, was nominated for a Publishing Triangle award and a Lambda Literary Award for nonfiction in 2000. She served as poetry editor for the first three years of the queer literary journal Bloom. She is co-editor, with David Bergman, of the Living Out autobiography series at the University of Wisconsin Press. In addition to Larkin's Lambda Literary Awards, her awards include fellowships in poetry and playwriting from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Poetry

• Housework (Out & Out Books, 1975) ISBN 091831402X
• A Long Sound (Granite Press, 1986) ISBN 0961488611
• Cold River (Painted Leaf Press, 1997) ISBN 0965155854
• Sor Juana's Love Poems/ Poemas de Amor (in Spanish and English, Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, Joan Larkin, Jaime Manrique; Painted Leaf Press, 1997, ISBN 0965155862, reprinted, University of Wisconsin Press, 2003) ISBN 0299187047

• My Body: New and Selected Poems (Hanging Loose Press, 2007) ISBN 9781931236744

Prose

• If You Want What We Have: Sponsorship Meditations (Hazelden, 1998) ISBN 9781568381923
• Glad Day: Daily Meditations for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender People (Hazelden, 1998) ISBN 9781568381893

Collections Edited

• Amazon Poetry: An Anthology (with Elly Bulkin, Out & Out Books, 1975) ISBN 0918314070
• Lesbian Poetry: An Anthology (with Elly Bulkin, Persephone Press, 1980) ISBN 0930436083
• Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time: An Anthology (with Carl Morse, St. Martin's Press, 1988) ISBN 0312022131
• A Woman Like That: Lesbian and Bisexual Writers Tell their Coming Out Stories (Avon/Bard Books, 1999) ISBN 9780380802470

Recordings

• A Sign I Was Not Alone (LP recording of poets Adrienne Rich, Honor Moore, Audre Lorde, Joan Larkin, New York: Out & Out Books, 1980)

Limited Editions

• ‘’A Garden,’’ letterpress broadside (Center for Book Arts, NYC, 2005)
• ‘’Waste Not,’’ letterpress broadside (Bridge Press, Vermont, 2005)
• ‘’Boston Piano,’’ Belladonna limited edition poetry chapbook, June 2003
• ‘’Hard Differences,’’ letterpress broadside, American Populist Poetry Series, 1980

Plays: Staged Readings, Productions

• The AIDS Passion, staged reading, Mt. Holyoke College, April 1995
• The Living, staged reading, Huntington Theater Company, Boston, December 1996; full production, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, June 2000
• The Hole in the Sheet, book and lyrics for a klezmer musical farce, music by Steve Elson (currently seeking production)
• Wiretap, Jean Cocteau Repertory Theater, NYC, December 2001, staged reading by Brooklyn College Theater Department
• Brother Dust, a hip-hop version of Sophocles' Antigone (currently seeking production)