Joan Hutton Landis was born in Morristown, New Jersey. She majored in English at Bennington College, where she studied poetry with Stanley Kunitz, Howard Nemerov, and Ben Belitt. After working in publishing, she married Kendall Landis and lived in Paris, Jeddah, Beirut, and Casa Blanca. During those years she wrote and published poetry and was active in theater. Returning to the States in 1967, with her husband and three sons, Landis studied poetry with Richard Wilbur at Wesleyan University, where she earned her masters degree. During that period her work was published in small journals, as well as in the Transatlantic Review and The New York Times.

Landis continued her education, earning a Ph.D. at Bryn Mawr. She was awarded a Danforth Graduate Fellowship for Women. Her articles on Shakespeare were published in Hamlet Studies, The Upstart Crow and the Shakespeare Quarterly, among others. Her reviews of the poetry of Louise Gluck, Ben Belitt, and John Peck appeared in Salmagundi.

In 1977 Landis began teaching at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, helping to form the core curriculum, initiating both poetry and fiction workshops and becoming the first Chair of the Liberal Arts Department. She participated in Frank Bidart's poetry workshops at the New York Summer Writers' Institute in Saratoga Springs, where she was encouraged to work on the manuscript that eventually became That Blue Repair. Landis's most recent poetry has appeared in Parnassus: Poetry in Review, The Gettysburg Review, Poetry, Salmagundi, and Spoon River. 

In March 2012, Landis's poem, "That Blue Repair" inspired a musical piece for strings and cello, composed by Chris Rogerson and commissioned by the New York Youth Orchestra, which was performed at Carnegie Hall and received a rave review in the NY Times. Rogerson has been commissioned by Orchestra 2001, to set another of Landis's poems for performance in 2013.

In 2011, Landis's poems "Autobiography," "March Simile" and "Amherst Noon" were set to music by composer, John B. Hedges, and performed by the Chestnut Street Singers in Philadelphia in June. 

The Nothing Is Not Ready Circus is for the not yet existing upriser masses and their kids who need to practice their upriser skills by teaming up with butterflies, cockroaches and elephants. Lions, horses and dogs are also employed to invent the correct rhythmical patterns that fight planetary destruction. The boot flags of the 15th century peasant revolution lead the way. Nothing Is Not Ready is the name of the show.