More About Joy

Originally from Buffalo NY, Joy graduated from Bard College, where she studied writing and literature. After two years teaching high school English in NYC as part of Teach for America, Joy switched gears to pursue writing full-time. She holds an MFA from The New School, where she also taught as a TA under music journalist and cultural critic Greil Marcus. In 2016, after leaving NYC for Western MA's Pioneer Valley (Northampton MA), Joy founded Pioneer Valley Writers' Workshop, a literary arts organization (now virtual) with a commitment to rigorous craft-based writing workshops and seminars. 

​Joy's short stories have appeared in various literary magazines, including The Fairy Tale Review, Conjunctions, ​Tin House, American Short Fiction, The Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, ​SmokeLong Quarterly,  New Ohio Review, PANK, and F(r)iction, and forthcoming in The Missouri Review. Her novel-in-progress has been generously supported by grants from The Elizabeth George Foundation and The Speculative Literature Foundation, and she's received residencies/fellowships from Yaddo, Vermont Studio Center, and Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. Joy was also the Margaret Bridgman Scholar in Fiction at The Bread Loaf Writers' Conference (2018) and a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the 2021 Sewanee Writers' Conference. Her short stories have received recognition from numerous contests, including The Wigleaf Top 50 (Very) Short Fictions and Ploughshares Emerging Writer's Contest (Honorable Mention for "How to Survive on Land").
​Joy lives in Northampton MA and is at work on a centuries-spanning ghost novel and a collection of short stories. Other things Joy loves: chess, playing bagpipe, learning languages, animals, and vegan food. She is also a proud alumna of Aurora Waldorf School in Western NY, where she was part of the first graduating class. ​​
Joy has served as Associate Fiction Editor at the literary magazine West Branch and has been part of admissions boards for Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Vermont Studio Center, and  the guest judge for the Teach! Write! Play! fellowship at Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. She has moderated panels at a number of conferences, including the Grub Street's Muse & The Marketplace (2022) and the 2021 and 2022 Association of Writers & Writing Program (AWP) conference, in which she led panels on Embracing the Strange: The Power of Genre-Bending in Fiction, The Literary Ghost Story, and Wrangling the Beast: Playing with Structure in the First Novel). 

Artist Statement

I’m a fiction writer - of short stories and a first novel-in-progress - and stylistically and thematically, I’m interested in “distortion…to get at truth" (Flannery O’Connor) in order to better explore the human condition. My current projects (novel-in-progress and stories) have evolved from my thoughts/feelings about the strangeness of existence itself, of living in a physical body, in a world. There is something more true to me about fiction that embraces this strangeness—acknowledges the deep mystery that surrounds us—and this is why I’m drawn to stories that incorporate elements of the fantastic, that push outside of boundaries, and that use the fantastic to tackle bigger, broader questions of existence, life/death, memory, identity, etc. I’m inspired by genre-bending writers such as Angela Carter, Madeline Miller, Karen Russell, Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, Ted Chiang, and George Saunders, to name just a few of the many.  I see my novel-in-progress and the short stories I'm currently working on as being in conversation with other contemporary, philosophical ghost stories; the literary-gothic; fairytales and mythology; as well as with ideas of memory/identity, haunting/voyeurism, thresholds/portals/doorways, and partnership/abandonment/loss.

Honors and Awards

  • Tennessee Williams Scholar, Sewanee Writers' Conference (2021)​
  • Fellowship, Yaddo (2019)
  • Fellowship, Vermont Studio Center (2019)
  • Teach! Write! Play! Fellowship, Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing (2018)
  • Margaret Bridgman Scholar in Fiction, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference (2018)
  • Grant awardee, The Elizabeth George Foundation (2018)
  • Gulliver Travel Research Grant, The Speculative Literature Foundation (2017)
  • Wigleaf Top 50 (Very) Short Fictions of 2017, for "Night Circus," published in PANK, Wigleaf (2017) ​
  • Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Contest (Honorable Mention), Ploughshares (2016)
  • Flash Fiction Contest Winner, F(r)iction Magazine (2016)
  • Short Story Challenge (4th Place overall), NYC Midnight (2016)
  • Mary McCarthy Award in Writing, Bard College (2007)

- Connect -

- Upcoming Events -

​Community Writing at Pioneer Valley Writers' Workshop (virtual)
Ongoing: First Friday of Every Month (6 - 7:30pm EST)
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- Alone in a Room: Newsletter -

Welcome! Alone in a Room is my monthly writing newsletter, featuring craft musings, original writing prompts, what I'm reading and thinking about, upcoming events, and general inspirational/literary goodness! ​