JoAnne Tompkins Books in Order

JoAnne Tompkins came to fiction after a long first career in law. She worked as a trial lawyer, mediator, and judicial officer, spending years with people whose lives had been knocked off balance by conflict, injury, violence, and abuse. That work gave her a close view of harm, but it also gave her something else to write toward, the stubborn resilience people can show when life goes badly wrong.

Instead of pushing her away from hard material, those years seem to have sharpened her interest in what happens after the crisis, when ordinary people have to keep going. Tompkins has said that seeing that human resilience is what nudged her toward writing. You can feel that in her fiction, which is serious about damage but never only about damage.

People stay at the center of everything.

She later earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College, and What Comes After began as her thesis novel. That origin makes sense. The book has the reach of a big, emotional story, but it is also built with a writer's patience for motive, contradiction, and consequence. By the time it was published in April 2021, her debut already felt shaped by both careful craft and a long habit of listening.

What Comes After is set in coastal Washington after the deaths of two teenage boys, and its plot turns on grief, guilt, faith, and the arrival of a pregnant sixteen-year-old girl named Evangeline. Readers often pick it up for the mystery and stay for the emotional depth. Tompkins gives real attention to Isaac, Lorrie, and Evangeline as complicated people, not just figures in a mystery plot, and the novel keeps asking how forgiveness, responsibility, and connection might look after something terrible.

What stands out in her work is the way she lingers in aftermath. She is interested in parents and children, neighbors, lonely people, and the awkward, necessary work of care. Even when the subject is dark, she keeps room on the page for decency, spiritual searching, and the small gesture that changes the next day. That balance is part of what makes her writing feel tough-minded and humane at the same time.

Place matters too. Tompkins lives in Port Townsend, Washington, and the Pacific Northwest atmosphere in What Comes After feels lived in, not borrowed. For the novel's Quaker thread, she spent time learning more about the Society of Friends, including a visit to Pendle Hill in Pennsylvania. In the book, faith is part of daily life, part of how people make sense of grief, silence, anger, and mercy.

Her shorter work has appeared in High Country News, Lit Hub, Writer in the World, and Stratus: Journal of Arts and Writing. She has also shared small reading memories that help explain the texture of her sensibility. As a child, she loved Mary O'Hara's horse books, especially My Friend Flicka, and remembered the pleasure of reading while imagining her mother's ranch-girl past. It is an earthy, story-minded detail, and it fits.

She has described herself as an introvert, happiest at home in the woods.

When What Comes After arrived, the response was strong. The novel was a New York Times Editor's Choice pick, a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Edgar Award for Best First Novel by an American Author, and a runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Those honors matter, but they are not the whole story. Tompkins continues to live in Port Townsend and work on new projects. So far, her bibliography is slim. The promise in it is not.