Joyce Dyer

Joyce Dyer (born July 20, 1947) is a U.S. writer of nonfiction and memoirs whose most recent memoir, Goosetown: Reconstructing an Akron Neighborhood, tells the story of the author's attempt to remember the first five years of her life growing up in an ethnic neighborhood in Akron called Old Wolf Ledge (known to residents as "Goosetown"), famous for its glacial formations, breweries, and cereal mills. Goosetown is the prequel to Gum-Dipped: A Daughter Remembers Rubber Town, her book about the decades when Akron was the Rubber Capital of the World. In it Dyer provides a loving but complicated portrait of her father and a view of the relationships among Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, its employees, and the city of Akron, Ohio. An earlier memoir was In a Tangled Wood: An Alzheimer's Journey, and she has also edited a collection of essays about place by Appalachian women writers, Bloodroot. Her first book, titled The Awakening: A Novel of Beginnings, was a scholarly study of Kate Chopin, a turn-of-the-century American writer. Joyce Dyer is John S. Kenyon Professor of English at Hiram College in Hiram, Ohio. At Hiram she won the Vencl-Carr Award for Teaching Excellence in 2006, the Michael Starr Award for Teaching Excellence in 1996, and a Paul E. Martin Merit Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1993, 1995, 1997, 1999, 2001, 2003, and 2010. Her biography is included in Contemporary Authors, volume 146, and in the New Revision Series, volume 91.

Background

Joyce Coyne (Dyer) was born in Akron, Ohio, during the summer of 1947. Her father, Thomas Coyne, was a supervisor for the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, and his experiences inspired Dyer to write Gum-Dipped: A Daughter Remembers Rubber Town, the 2004 required summer reading selection for the University of Akron and 2005 required reading for Hiram College. Dyer’s mother was a clerk for the Board of Education in Akron. Dyer graduated with a B.A. degree in English from Wittenberg University and a Ph.D. degree in English from Kent State University. She has taught at Lake Forest College in Illinois and Western Reserve Academy and Hiram College in Ohio. In addition to publishing five books, she is the author of numerous literary essays that have appeared in magazines such as North American Review, cream city review, and High Plains Literary Review and in anthologies such as After the Bell, Body Outlaws, We All Live Downstream, What's Normal?, and Educating the Imagination. She has read and lectured at St. Mary's College of Maryland, the Mercantile Library in Cincinnati, Otterbein College, Mount Union College, Appalachian State University, Wittenberg University, and the Great Lakes Writers Festival in Sheboygan, Wisconsin (2011) and served on staff at 826michigan Writers Conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan (2011), the Antioch Writers' Workshop in Yellow Springs, Ohio, the Appalachian Writers Workshop in Hindman, Kentucky, the Wright State University Institute on Writing and Teaching in Dayton, Ohio, and the Highland Summer Conference in Radford, Virginia. She recently served as visiting writer in creative nonfiction for the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing (NEOMFA). Dyer is currently working on two collections of essays and a book about John Brown. She lives in the Ohio Western Reserve with her husband, Daniel Osborn Dyer, a book reviewer and teacher.

Awards

Bibliography

Academic publications

Personal memoirs

Edited collections

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