Joyce (Coyne) Dyer was born in Akron, Ohio. Her father, Thomas William Coyne, was a supervisor for the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company and her mother clerked for the Akron Board of Education. Dyer graduated from Wittenberg University (in Springfield, Ohio) with a BA in English and earned a PhD in English from Kent State University. After completing her PhD, Dyer taught English at Lake Forest College, Western Reserve Academy, and then Hiram College, where she was the first director of the Lindsay-Crane Center for Writing and Literature and held the John S. Kenyon Chair in English for many years. As of 2024[update], she was professor emerita at Hiram.
Joyce married fellow writer and educator Daniel Osborn Dyer.[when?]
Dyer has written six nonfiction books, as well as numerous essays for literary periodicals. Dyer has also edited two collections of essays, Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers and From Curlers to Chainsaws: Women and Their Machines.
Dyer's first book, The Awakening: A Novel of Beginnings, was an academic study of late-19th-century author Kate Chopin. She then turned to memoirs, writing In a Tangled Wood: An Alzheimer's Journey about her mother's last years.
Her father's experiences at Firestone Tire and Rubber Company inspired Dyer to write Gum-Dipped: A Daughter Remembers Rubber Town, a commercial success. Gum-Dipped attempts to reconstruct the centrality of the rubber industry to midcentury Akron, Ohio through Dyer's relationship to her father. Dyer then wrote a prequel, Goosetown: Reconstructing an Akron Neighborhood, which describes Dyer's early childhood in Old Wolf Ledge (also called "Goosetown", because of the backyard geese many local German immigrant families kept).
Finally, from 2011 to 2021, Dyer wrote Pursuing John Brown: On the Trail of a Radical Abolitionist, a mix of memoir, biography, public history, and travel writing that analyzes the troubling life of its eponymous figure.
Personal memoirs
(1996) In a Tangled Wood: An Alzheimer's Journey
(2003) Gum-Dipped: A Daughter Remembers Rubber Town[1]
(2010) Goosetown: Reconstructing an Akron Neighborhood[2]
