Joyce Townsend's publications include a collection of short stories from D.C. Thompson & Co. in Scotland and articles in the Arizona Republic/Phoenix Gazette; Plain Dealer of Cleveland. Her poems have appeared in Piedmont Literary Review, Skylark Fine Arts, and Emily Hill Award. She also has won awards and followships for her fiction. She has written reviews for Rain Taxi and Literary Criticism for Kirkus Discovery. “An American in Copenhagen,” an interview with Thomas E. Kennedy, will be published in the March-April, 2010 issue of Writer's Chronicle.
        With a B.A. in elementary education and an Master's in social service administration, Joyce's career has included positions in children and family services, foster care and adoption programs, parent training workshops, directing and coordinating of a series of alternative schools, and public school teaching. She also has been a waitress, retail salesperson, art teacher; coach and editor for other writers and leader of workshops in writing. She narrates Talking Books for the National Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped.
        Based on an as yet unpublished memoir called Three Rs and the Other F Word—FREEDOM! “Greentree School” tells of an Ohio mother/wife/ex-teacher's search for utopia amidst the political and social turmoil of the 1960s and 70s.  Driven by radical beliefs, she burns familiar bridges and plunges the family into the alternative education scene to claim the rewards—and penalties—of living outside known, familiar boundaries..