Joan Kendall was born and bred in Birmingham, Alabama. She was a member of the Board of Contributors with "The Birmingham News." Her work has appeared in The Citizen Magazine and the anthology The Short and Sweet of It, and she has appeared several times on PBS’s For the Record. Joan twice served on the Alabama State Textbook Committee at the request of the governor, and at the request of the state superintendent, she served on the steering committee of the Alabama Reading Initiative. She has spoken at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute Conference, Alabama Veterans of Foreign Wars (keynote), Leadership Alabama, Policy Exchange Foundation, and Kiwanis Clubs. She received a national award for involving the community in education. In 2003, Joan helped launch an after-school program for inner-city children, which is now in over thirty schools serving 2,000 children. Joan and her husband, Henry, still reside in Birmingham, Alabama, and have three daughters and eight grandchildren.
