Dr. Joan Cartwright is a professor of Speech Communication at Southeastern College in West Palm Beach, Florida and in 2017 completed her Doctorate in Business Administration/ Marketing (DBA) at Northcentral University in Arizona, but it’s for her writing, composing, lecturing, producing, research and documentation concerning women composers (especially) in jazz and blues, and for her founding in 2007 of the non-profit Women In Jazz South Florida, Inc., that the Jazz Journalists Association hails her as 2019 South Florida Jazz Hero.

Dr. Cartwright is clearly a person of many parts and high energy. In the 12 years of its existence, WIJSF has released six compilation albums, comprising 63 songs from 45 women composers. Since 2008, she has hosted 300 episodes on MUSICWOMAN Radio, published four Catalogs of Women in Arts & Business and Musicwoman Magazine’s premier edition. She has published 14 books with her own FYI Communications, Inc. on lulu.com. She is an ASCAP-affiliated publisher and songwriter, a member of National League of American Pen Women, and through WIJSF maintains international relations with diverse peer groups. She blogs and has contributed to the South Florida Times, In Focus Magazine, Global Woman Magazine and Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora. She has an impressive array of academic accreditations and has been honored by several professional associations. But one senses that the devotion of her WIJSF members, and the continuous support of her daughter Mimi Johnson, with whom she owns  MJTV Network (“Positive Influential Television”), is based on personal qualities that imbue her larger projects.

Among those is a goal to build the Musicwoman Archive to house the musical and literary works of women musicians and provide performance and educational center where women musicians can thrive. In educational workshops Dr. Cartwright presents, which highlight the pitfalls and benefits of the music business, she insists that “Knowing music theory is a step in the right direction for any singer who truly wants to excel in the world of music!” Yet her own breadth of endeavors — acting, singing, media creation, marketing, advertising, public speaking, and public relations skills as well as command of theory are arrows in her quiver — attests to the reach she models for all women, all artists, anyone whose ambitions extend to being creative, innovative, expressive, self-realized, in the moment while communing with others, sharing experience, telling truth, seeking  beauty — in other words, living as a Jazz Hero. ~ Howard Mandel