About Joy

Joy A. J. Howard, Ph.D.

COACH & Editor

Joy grew up in southern Michigan, a writer & storyteller from a young age. She wrote stories on construction paper,  tying up the pages with yellow & orange yarn. Her heart for hearing the voices of all people was especially shaped at Lewton Elementary School. She sat in classrooms with diverse peers from all over the world & was taught by teachers who believed urban students of all races & all socioeconomic backgrounds possessed great potential. One of her teachers was a survivor of the American WWII Internment of Japanese peoples. Mrs. Diana Sablan impressed upon her students the love & justice all people deserve regardless of gender, race, or any other difference.     

Joy majored in English & Secondary Education at Michigan State University in East Lansing. She was a writing tutor at MSU in the Writing Center, training under Dr. Janet Swenson & Dr. Patricia Stock. She became an English teacher & taught American Literature in urban high schools & middle schools in Michigan. (She even taught elementary school one summer.)

She moved to New Hampshire & completed a Master's degree in English at the University of New Hampshire. She wrote her Master's thesis on the work of the 19th century Holiness preacher, Julia Foote. Her thesis was directed by Dr. John Ernest & his mentorship emphasized that one could do scholarship & seek racial justice while doing so. Joy was a writing center tutor & a liaison for the Writing Across the Curriculum Program to the Biology Department at UNH under the direction of Dr. Dot Kasik.   

While at UNH, Joy fell head over heels for a plant community ecologist finishing his Ph.D. on fire ecology. She finished her thesis, they got married, & they moved to Indiana for her Ph.D. studies. They missed the snow, the ocean, the city bustle of Boston, & especially the mountains of New Hampshire & Vermont, but they made lifelong friends that are worth more than can be expressed. Joy completed her Ph.D. in early American literary studies from Purdue University under the superb direction of Dr. Kristina Bross. Her guidance shaped Joy’s intersectional approach to interpreting texts written at the intersection of confounding gender, racial, religious, & colonial spaces.

Joy has been a visiting professor of early American literature at the United States Military Academia, West Point & Saint Joseph's University here in Philadelphia. She was a tenure-track assistant professor at New Jersey City University before starting her own coaching company & moving into coaching, consulting, & editing full time.

Joy offers coaching to academics at all stages, but she specializes in working with clients who have been/and are marginalized, oppressed, & underrepresented in academia and publishing.

Joy passionately believes all voices deserve to be heard. That little girl who wrote stories on construction paper and tied them together with yarn now researches and writes about women's lives in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. She has been active in the Society of Early Americanists since 2004 and stepped into the position of Treasurer for the national organization in 2019. (Interested in Joy's research and publications? Go here, just be aware that I haven’t updated that other website in quite a long time. Really. A very long time.) 

More about Joy:

West Philadelphia has been home for almost 20 years. She adores the mural arts, the African American Museum, the Art Museum, Bartram's Garden, & farmer’s markets.  Co-raising her god children here has made life beyond wonderful. She thinks her god kids are the best kids ever & she knows she’s completely bias. Joy also loves coffee, sunflowers, & is an avid letter writer, just like her Grandma was. Handwriting letters is her love language, & so is crocheting.