Joyce Dyer

Joyce Dyer (born July 20, 1947) is a U.S. writer of nonfiction and memoirs whose most recent 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 (known to residents as "Goosetown"), 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 was In a Tangled Wood: An Alzheimer's Journey, and she has also edited a collection of essays about place by Appalachian women writers, Bloodroot. Her first book, titled The Awakening: A Novel of Beginnings, was a scholarly study of Kate Chopin, a turn-of-the-century American writer. Joyce Dyer is John S. Kenyon Professor of English at Hiram College in Hiram, Ohio. At Hiram she won the Vencl-Carr Award for Teaching Excellence in 2006, the Michael Starr Award for Teaching Excellence in 1996, and a Paul E. Martin Merit Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1993, 1995, 1997, 1999, 2001, 2003, and 2010. Her biography is included in Contemporary Authors, volume 146, and in the New Revision Series, volume 91.