David

Joy

Award Winning Novelist

Writer & Memoirist

Travels from: Charlotte, NC

“[David Joy] is a man who sees his homeplace clearly and who writes like his hand was touched by God.” — The New York Times

A twelfth generation North Carolinian, David Joy grew up in the Piedmont along the Catawba River, moved away at eighteen, and has spent the last 22 years 100 miles west in the mountains of Jackson County. His work is place-driven and deeply rooted to Appalachia, and has been translated into six languages. In 2023, his debut novel was adapted to film starring Billy Bob Thornton and Robin Wright.

Joy is the author of five novels, including Those We Thought We Knew (winner of the 2023 Willie Morris Award and the 2023 Thomas Wolfe Prize), When These Mountains Burn (winner of the 2020 Dashiell Hammett Award), The Line That Held Us (winner of the 2018 Southern Book Prize), The Weight of This World, and Where All Light Tends to Go (Edgar finalist for Best First Novel). His stories and creative nonfiction have appeared in a number of publications, most recently Garden & Gun, The New York Times Magazine, and TIME. He is also the author of the memoir Growing Gills: A Fly Fisherman’s Journey and a coeditor of Gather at the River: Twenty-Five Authors on Fishing, a book he spearheaded to raise money for the CAST For Kids Foundation.

Joy lives in Tuckasegee, North Carolina with his dog Edie Munster.

David's Featured Titles

Complicating the Narrative of Appalachia and an Evolving American South

Appalachia and the American South both have very long and lasting literary histories. From names like Faulkner and O’Connor, to the lasting impact of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, there is a time honored tradition of rich and celebrated storytelling. Despite this tradition, for a very long time these types of stories portrayed a very particular, and very White reality of these places. If I were to ask someone outside of Appalachia to describe what someone from this region looked like, they’d likely describe someone who looked like me: a White man with a beard, likely wearing overalls. No stage had been given to Indigenous writers. Realities such as Black Appalachia were virtually nonexistent, and most assuredly not represented by the canon. All of this has begun to change over the last few decades as big publishing has broadened the stage and new voices have worked to complicate the long-held narratives. From writers like Crystal Wilkinson, Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr., Annette Saunook Clapsaddle, Neema Avashia, suddenly there are brilliant writers bringing light to what has always been here but has historically been dismissed, downplayed, or ignored. In this talk, we’ll discuss the importance of these narratives, the importance of inclusion, and what we stand to gain by repainting the landscape to fully celebrate the diversity of this place we call home.

Giving Voice to the Silenced: Representation in Working Class Literature

One of the most empowering moments in Joy’s life as a writer came in college when a professor handed him a copy of William Gay’s story collection, I Hate To See That Evening Sun Go Down. He recalls that being the first time he, “realized you could write a story about those people—my people—and that you could do it that well.” Since then he has dedicated a career to writing the stories of his people. As he wrote in an essay for The Bitter Southerner, “The kids I grew up with came to know truths that don’t reach most people until they’re adults if they ever reach them at all. There’s a poem by one of my favorite writers, the Kentucky poet Rebecca Gayle Howell, titled “My Mother Told Us Not To Have Children,” and in that poem she has a line where she asks, “Is gentleness a resource of the privileged?” She answers, “In this respect, my people were poor. / We fought to eat and fought each other because // we were tired from fighting. We had no time / to share. Instead our estate was honesty, // which is not tenderness.” And maybe that’s all I’ve ever really known: honesty. Maybe that’s all any of us knew.”

Writing Across Gaps from Place, Race, to Gender

Whether setting a story in Paris having only ever shortly visited or choosing to write a male protagonist as a female writer, as writers we are constantly writing across gaps. In a time where terms like “cancel culture” and “sensitivity reads” get tossed around, and many writers voice censorship concerns, it is increasingly important to recognize that some gaps involve historical power and risk both appropriation and perpetuating dangerous stereotypes. The question is never, can a writer do this? The writer can make any choice they wish. But they must also come to recognize that mistakes with regards to these types of gaps are never inconsequential. Whether writing across a gap of place, race, class, sexuality, or gender, the central question should always be, when crossing this gap do I carry a position of power?

As Joy explained in an interview with writer Russell Worth Parker, “the truth is that the gaps are just…they’re more major for me and you and they always will be. And that’s not a ‘poor pitiful me’ thing to say, the reason that those gaps are larger is because there is not a gap that we can cross that does not involve power. Any gap I cross involves power. If I cross gender, I have power. If I cross-race, I most assuredly have power. If I cross sexuality, I have power. As a white cis man, the consequences of getting it wrong are just bigger and it’s because they’re dangerous. So, I hear this all the time, people are like, ‘Why can’t I write Black characters, you got Black writers writing White characters?’ And sure, again, the difference is power. Me as a White man getting a Black woman wrong is more consequential than Shawn Cosby, who’s a writer I love, as a Black man getting a White man wrong because he’s not operating from a place of power. It can’t carry the same consequence.”

In this talk, we’ll discuss questions that writers can ask in order to more safely navigate crossing these gaps when a story necessitates that decision.

Clinging to Cultural Identity and The Role of Literature as Time Capsule

Joy’s first ancestor to come into North Carolina moved south out of Virginia in the late 1600s into what would become Bertie County. He is a son of the South, but more exactly he is a son of The Old North State. The place he grew up, however, is a place that he cannot go back to. The pastures are gone. The wood lots are leveled. The houses have been erased and replaced by warehouses and sorting facilities. As Gertrude Stein once said of where she’d grown up, “There is no there there.”

Much of Joy’s work is focused on cultural erasure. He has said that he believes the North Carolina mountains are a generation away from cultural extinction. He has stated time and time again that his greatest fear is homogeny. In an interview with Salvation South, Joy explained, “I grew up in Moore’s Chapel. My father grew up in Paw Creek. I think he made it about five miles down the road in total. But all of my paternal family is from right there. Paw Creek, Moore’s Chapel, Berryhill, Steele Creek. And those are names that still exist on signs, but that’s it…It’s a hard thing to describe, primarily because it’s something that disappeared so rapidly. I grew up to a rural people who were swallowed by a city. I grew up a mile or so down the road from an uncle who kept rabbit dogs. I grew up running through a cattle pasture every day to fish a small farm pond for bream and bass and crappie and catfish. I grew up riding around with a grandmother who pointed to fields where she’d worked cotton and tobacco as a child, who pointed to all of the houses her father and brothers had built.

“As for the cultural extinction that accompanies the disappearance and erasure of place, that’s what keeps me up at night. It’s like I wrote at the end of When These Mountains Burn, ‘Now everyone was sitting around watching the last of it flicker like a sunset with eyes blind and minds dumb to the fact that when the night finally came there would come no light again. The very nature of things demanded that there would come a moment in history when hopefulness would equate to naivety, when the situation would have become too dire for saving. Raymond knew this, and it was that final thought that had left his heart in ruins.’”

So how does literature come to serve as preservation? Will there come a time when what’s on the page is the only proof of the gone and the going away?

Shifting Perspectives Toward Sensible Gun Reform

An avid hunter and gun owner, Joy has written at length about the issues surrounding American gun law and the need for sensible reform for outlets such as The New York Times Magazine. He has spoken on Brady United’s “Red, Blue & Brady” podcast as well as on conference panels with gun violence survivors and spokespeople for the NRA. Joy’s unique perspective centers on having been raised with and around firearms, but acknowledging a need for and pushing toward sensible gun laws. From recognizing a post-9/11 militarization of gun culture to the perversion of liberty as an untethered Second Amendment, Joy has a keen insight of America’s historical relationship with guns, how we reached the point where we are, and how we might move toward someplace safer for future generations.

“[David] Joy writes like his hand was touched by God.” — The New York Times

“Unflinching and timely…Joy has mastered the high-stakes, page-turning Appalachian-noir style, and through this lens, the preconceived notions of life in the mountains are overturned.” — Christian Science Monitor on Those We Thought We Knew

“Outstanding. . . When These Mountains Burn is a crime novel, surely – and a damn good one – but it’s also a snapshot of small-town America at a fracture point, when the least of the concerns is the fire that could consume everyone, all at once.” — USA Today on When These Mountains Burn

“A suspenseful page-turner, complete with one of the absolutely killer endings that have become one of Joy’s signatures.” — Los Angeles Times on The Line That Held Us

“Exquisitely written, heart-wrenching . . . Joy’s descriptions are lyrical and lingering.” — Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

“David Joy’s novel brought me to my knees. Exquisitely written and heart-wrenching, it reminded me of Faulkner in its dark depiction of family loyalty — that “old fierce pull of blood.” . . . Joy’s descriptions are lyrical and lingering. . . . In the end, the line that holds Joy’s characters may be fraught and frayed, but its pull is fierce.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Darkly stunning Appalachian noir.” — Huffington Post

“[A] remarkable first novel . . . This isn’t your ordinary coming-of-age novel, but with his bone-cutting insights into these men and the region that bred them, Joy makes it an extraordinarily intimate experience.” — Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review on Where All Light Tends To Go

Coming Soon!

Honors, Awards & Recognition

2023 Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction for Those We Thought We Knew
2023 Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award for Those We Thought We Knew
2020 Dashiell Hammett Prize for When These Mountains Burn
2019 Southern Book Prize for The Line That Held Us
2019 St. Francis Literary Prize Finalist for The Line That Held Us
2018 Ragan-Rubin Award for Literary Achievement from the NC English Teachers Association (NCETA)
2018 Tillie Olsen Award from the Working Class Studies Association (WCSA) for The Weight Of This World
2017 Longlist for International DUBLIN Literary Award
2016 Edgar Award Finalist for Best First Novel

Media clips

PBS | Southern Book Prize Winner David Joy

Salvation South | Made You Look

Anglers Journal | Shaped by Water

NPR | ‘Digging In The Trash’: How Poor Southerners Are Seen

The New York Times Magazine | Gun Culture is my culture and I fear for what it has become

The Bitter Southerner | Digging In The Trash

Garden & Gun | Mutually Reclusive

Red Blue & Brady | Navigating the Landscape of Gun Ownership, Culture, and Reform

Media Kit

By clicking the link below you will be directed to a Google Docs Folder
where you can download author photos and cover images.

Joy

Complicating the Narrative of Appalachia and an Evolving American South

Giving Voice to the Silenced: Representation in Working Class Literature

Writing Across Gaps from Place, Race, to Gender

Clinging to Cultural Identity and The Role of Literature as Time Capsule

Shifting Perspectives Toward Sensible Gun Reform

Honors, Awards & Recognition

Media clips

Media Kit

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