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Joy has published poems, stories and essays in various literary journals including The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah,  Alaska Quarterly Review, and College English. In 1999 Limberlost Press published a fine-press collection of her poems, Sinning in Italy. Her collection of stories, The Art of Absence (Lost Horse Press, 2004), and her novel, My Mother’s Lovers (University of Nevada Press, 2002) were finalists for the ForeWord Magazine Fiction Award among others. Her essays have received Shenandoah’s Thomas H. Carter Prize and, for The Georgia Review, the Gold Award for Best Profile in the annual competition sponsored by the Magazine Association of the Southeast.  One of her essays received Special Mention in the Pushcart Prizes for 2008. She has been awarded Idaho Commission on the Arts Fellowships for both fiction and poetry.

She is a regular adjudicator for Chicago’s Union League and Civic Arts Foundation and has been invited to adjudicate the Tennessee Arts Commission Awards in 2009. In addition, she gives presentations and workshops on all aspects of writing to local schools.

She is currently working on a memoir focusing on her father’s experience as a young surgeon during World War II and on her journeys to Europe to travel in his footsteps.  This book is partially funded by a UI Sabbatical Leave and an Idaho Humanities Council Research Fellowship.