Biography

Joyce Lott Joyce Lott grew up in Atlantic City, New Jersey, before casinos, when Steel Pier’s Diving Horse and Planter’s Mr. Peanuts attracted boardwalk crowds. After only one year at Wellesley College, she married and raised three children at the shore.

When her youngest entered kindergarten, Joyce and her husband moved to Princeton, New Jersey, a town from which she could commute to college. During the time her children were growing up, she graduated from Douglass College and earned at Masters at Rutgers University.

Like many women of that era, Joyce went through a transition, divorced, and entered the job market. Her book A Teacher’s Stories, Reflections on High School Writers (Boynton/Cook Heinemann), written after years of teaching high school English, records her daily observations on what really takes place in a high school classroom. In it, she tells stories about her own teaching and how she established a classroom environment where students and teachers have time to reflect, play with language, make many starts, and accomplish work that matters to them.

In Princeton, she joined Cool Women Poets and began to publish essays and poetry in Journal of NJ Poets, Kalliope, Ms. Magazine, The Paterson Literary Review, The Times, The Writer’s Chronicle, Writing on the Edge , and other journals. She won third prize in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards and was a finalist for the Ragdale Foundation’s Frances Shaw Fellowship.

Joyce remarried Gary Lott, a teacher and artist, and lived with him in a house they created together filled with windows and skylights. Beams from an old barn Gary tore down in upper New York State extend along the walls and ceiling.

After twenty years of marraige, Gary died. Joyce published her first poetry book Dear Mrs. Dalloway (Finishing Line Press) shortly thereafter. In September 2006, Garrison Keillor read one of Joyce’s poems on public radio.

Joyce Greenberg Lott’s new poetry book An Unexpected World (Finishing Line Press) includes poems not only about grief but also about her life-affirming re-entry into an unanticipated life.

Now retired from teaching, Joyce enjoys her six grandchildren, yoga and tennis. She is presently working on a creative nonfiction book about life in suburbia with a co-author. When Joyce is not writing, she likes to travel around the world with a friend she didn’t expect to meet.

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