Born in San Francisco, CA, and raised in Chatham, NJ, Joyce McDonald received her BA and MA from the University of Iowa, and went on to complete her Ph.D. at Drew University. She is the author of The stuff of our Forebears: Willa Cather's Southern Heritage (University of Alabama Press). Her dissertation “The Incommunicable Past:  Willa Cather's Pastoral Modes and the Southern Literary Imagination” won the t he Helen LePage and William Hale Chamberlain Prize awarded for the Ph.D. dissertation that is “singularly distinguished by creative thought and excellent prose style. She has taught at East Stroudsburg University in PA, Drew University in NJ, and is currently on the faculty of the Spaulding University Brief-residency MFA in Writing Program in Louisville, KY.

She has presented papers at academic conferences, including the American Literature Association Conference and the Association of Pennsylvania State Universities.

Her interest in southern literature includes a number of essays on southern authors, among them an essay on Robert Penn Warren, "Lacan's Mirror State as Symbolic Metaphor in All the Kings Men" (The Southern Quarterly). Click here to read.

For the past twelve years she has served on the Rutgers University Council of Children's Literature.

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