Joyce Hinnefeld

Joyce Hinnefeld is an American writer of fiction and nonfiction. She is a graduate of the PhD program at the State University of New York – Albany and is an Associate Professor of English at Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She was director of the 2014 Moravian Writer's Conference and is the author of the books Tell Me Everything and Other Stories (1998), In Hovering Flight (2008), and Stranger Here Below (2010). Her work tends to address challenging social issues while exploring the inner world of its female characters, particularly their mother-daughter relationships. Hinnefeld's short fiction has been included in publications such as the Denver Quarterly and the Greensboro Review and anthologies including Prairie Hearts: Women's Writings on the Midwest and Many Windows: Twenty Years of Great Fiction and Poetry from the Writers Community. Her collection of short stories, Tell Me Everything and Other Stories, won the 1997 Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Bakeless Prize for fiction. Her debut novel, In Hovering Flight, was selected as IndieBound's #1 Indie Next Pick in September 2008. The novel follows Addie Kavanagh, a cancer-stricken birder, environmental activist, and painter, during her final conversations with her daughter and closest friends. The Washington Post's Ron Charles described the novel as a meditation on death, the complexity of human relationships, and the environment that is "quiet as twilight and just as lovely." Her most recent novel, Stranger Here Below, examines the developing relationship between Maze, a white student, and Mary Elizabeth, a black student, who are roommates at the newly integrated Berea College in Kentucky in 1961. Maze and Mary Elizabeth seek to understand how their experiences and family histories have been shaped by race, class, religion, and sexuality in a work Ariel Balter of the New York Journal of Books described as "graceful . . . a beautiful tapestry of a novel."