Joan Albarella

     Hello! I'm Joan Albarella, a writer from Buffalo, New York. This website is designed to share my books and plays with you. Join me on this reflective creative journey to see how I explored the power of words. Creativity was everywhere in my large family, apparent by the mutual respect of our neighbor, Charles Burchfield. My first poetry publications were in high school where I fell in love with meter and conciseness, which I think is apparent in my collections: Again For the First Time, Mirror Me, Poems For the Asking, Women, Flowers, Fantasy, Spirit and Joy, and in over two-hundred individual poems, essays, articles, and short stories published in anthologies, magazines and media. I was a teacher, actor, director, and writer for children’s theater, and coordinator for a Performing Arts Program at a boy's detention facility. I ran a small publishing company and worked in a print shop, spent time with the Sisters of Social Service and an ashram. My adventures also included Make-up Artist for Reading Rainbow, Production Assistant for radio/ television programs, and journalist/photographer for the Buffalo Catholic Diocese where I built my skills in researching, interviewing, and writing dialog.

I returned to teaching at the SUNY Buffalo Educational Opportunity Center and became their first female full professor. My interest in oral histories led to a video library of firsthand accounts of the Civil Rights Movement, plus two biographies of women religious. I also wrote, produced and directed four, one-woman plays: Mother Cabrini's Mission to America; Always In My Heart: The Story of St. Marianne Cope; Light and Dark: the Story of Sr. Judith Fenyvesi, SSS, and This Little Light of Mine, The Story of Sister Karen Klimczak, SSJ.  My Nikki Barnes Mystery Series; Agenda for Murder, Called to Kill, Close to You, and Evil examines the grittier side of life and post-war trauma. They are amateur detective novels where good always prevails. My writing became more eclectic with Sister Amnesia, a humorous allegory; Katharine Hepburn's Brownies, a play about murder and the power of friendship; and two more religious plays, Guardians of Gardenville, the Fourteen Holy Helpers and St. Cecelia.