Instructor Bio: Joyce Maynard

Joyce Maynard has been a journalist and fiction writer for over thirty years, beginning her career while still in her teens, as a writer for Seventeen, and with the publication of a New York Times Magazine cover story, "An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back on Life" that formed the basis for her first book, Looking Back: A Chronicle of Growing Up Old in the Sixties.

Since then, she has been a reporter and feature writer for The New York Times, an on-air commentator and essayist with CBS Radio, and, for eight years, published a weekly column, "Domestic Affairs, with The New York Times Syndicate, which ran in over fifty papers nationwide. Author of over a dozen "Hers" and "Lives" columns in the New York Times, she has also published personal essays in O, the Oprah Magazine, More, Mademoiselle, Newsweek, Self, The San Francisco Examiner, Redbook, and in Harrowsmith and Parenting magazines (where she had monthly columns) and numerous other publications.

On radio, her essays have appeared for many years on NPR's "All Things Considered". She has also appeared a number of times as a performer with the New York-based storytelling collective, The Moth. Author of four novels (including To Die For, later adapted into a film starring Nicole Kidman), she has also published a collection of first person essays, Domestic Affairs, and the best-selling memoir, At Home in the World, now translated into seven languages. A number of her essays have been widely anthologized in teaching texts, including The Norton Reader.

A frequent teacher of writing at workshops and schools around the U.S., currently at work on her fifth novel, Maynard describes herself as "having reached the point in my own writing life where one of the greatest sources of fulfillment is helping other writers find their own best voice and tell their story."