An Introduction

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Joan Fernandez is a historical novelist and speaker who tells the stories of women history overlooked. She brings an unusual pair of credentials to the work: an award-winning novelist’s ear for story and thirty-six years of marketing experience.

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Her debut novel, Saving Vincent: A Novel of Jo van Gogh (2025), tells the true story of Johanna van Gogh-Bonger. Jo was widowed at twenty-eight and left with a young son and hundreds of unsold canvases by a painter nobody wanted. Over three decades she placed the work, cultivated critics and dealers, and published Vincent’s letters, building the reputation the world now takes for granted. The novel won a Readers’ Favorite Gold Medal and an American Writing Award, and Kirkus Reviews called it “an intriguing art- and history-filled tribute to an oft-overlooked dynamic woman.”

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Most accounts of Jo emphasize her devotion. Joan also reads the record as a marketer, and she has the background for it. Over twenty-two years at Edward Jones, she rose to general partner. Her specialty was translation: turning the firm’s dense equity research into publications ordinary investors could actually read, which grew subscriptions tenfold, past one million. She later led research on generational, multicultural and women’s audiences and facilitated the firm’s Women’s Business Forum. So she can show audiences both the human story and the strategy beneath it: the positioning and patience that made an unknown painter a global name.

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Joan tells Jo’s story two ways. As narrative history, it suits libraries, museums, book clubs and arts organizations. As a strategy case study, it suits women’s leadership events, investor groups and entrepreneur forums. A growing number of hosts book both as a two-part program.

She has presented at the Historical Novel Society’s US and UK conferences, the Women’s Fiction Writers Association, the History through Fiction Conference and UMSL’s Women’s Leadership Institute. In 2020 she founded WFWA’s Historical Fiction group, now nearly two hundred authors strong. Audiences ask questions past the closing minute, and many hosts have invited her back.

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She divides her time between St. Louis and Sedona, Arizona, where her Cuban husband cooks the meals and her grandkids do most of the storytelling.