Joyce Dyer

Joyce Dyer is a U.S. writer of nonfiction. Her 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, 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, In a Tangled Wood: An Alzheimer's Journey, was published by Southern Methodist University Press in 1996, shortly after the death of Annabelle Coyne, the author's mother. Dyer has also edited two collections of essays, Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers and From Curlers to Chainsaws: Women and Their Machines. Her first book, The Awakening: A Novel of Beginnings, was a scholarly study of Kate Chopin, a turn-of-the-century American writer. Joyce Dyer is Professor Emerita of English at Hiram College, where she directed the Lindsay-Crane Center for Writing and Literature and held the John S. Kenyon Chair in English for several years. Recipient of the 1998 Appalachian Book of the Year Award, the 2009 David B. Saunders Award in Creative Nonfiction, the 2016 Independent Book Publisher Gold Medal Award for anthology, and Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards, Dyer spent the last ten years working on a book about abolitionist John Brown, who grew up in Hudson, Ohio, the town where the author lives. A mix of memoir, biography, American history, and travel writing, Pursuing John Brown: On the Trail of a Radical Abolitionist was published by the University of Akron Press in May of 2022. Dyer's biography is included in Contemporary Authors, volume 146, and in the New Revision Series, volume 91.