Novelist and journalist Joyce Maynard has published hundreds of essays as well as 18 books, both fiction and non-fiction, including the memoir At Home in the World and the novels To Die For and Labor Day, both adapted for film. She began her career in journalism in the 1970s, writing for several publications, most notably Seventeen magazine and The New York Times. Maynard contributed to Mademoiselle and Harrowsmith magazines in the 1980s while also beginning a career as a novelist with the publication of her first novel, Baby Love (1981). Her novel The Bird Hotel was published in May 2023.
Every winter for more than two decades, Maynard has led the Lake Atitlan memoir workshop, Write by the Lake, in Guatemala, which she founded in 2002. Maynard is a longtime performer at The Moth and a Fellow of MacDowell and Yaddo.
Maynard received significant media attention in 1998 with the publication of At Home in the World, which deals with her affair with J. D. Salinger. Her novel, Count the Ways, was recently awarded the Grand Prix for American literature in France. While at MacDowell in 2023, she completed the sequel, How the Light Gets In (HarperCollins, 2024).
During her 2008 residency, Joyce started and finished the first drafts of two books: a memoir about her experiences living and running a writing workshop in Guatemala, and a novel that was tentatively titled The Other Side of the Wall.
