Joy Jordan Lake

We're so glad you stopped by! On this site, you can READ and HEAR EXCERPTS of published and in-process work, sign up for book GIVEAWAYS, check on Joy's upcoming EVENTS, and find DISCUSSION QUESTIONS FOR BOOK CLUBS and community groups. If you want to learn about how universities and schools are using Joy's novel BLUE HOLE BACK HOME in the classroom, as a COMMON BOOK, and for SUMMER READING, we hope you'll find lots of help here, including a brief trailer, a television interview, and the first chapter. On the attached blog, JOIN THE CONVERSATION on Story and the Search for Meaning or on Compassion and the Arts. We'd love to hear from you!

BLUE HOLE BACK HOME Chosen as Common Book, Classroom Text and Summer Reading

Blue Hole Back Home is being used in universities, high schools and community settings to spur discussions on American culture, history, and diversity. The novel was selected, for example, as the 2009 Common Book for Baylor University's first-year students, who met in small groups to consider issues of courage, reconciliation and social transformation. Want to know more about how Blue Hole Back Home might function in your academic, book club or community setting? You can see a television interview about how one high school is using the novel, watch a brief trailer with audio from the first chapter, and read more information under the Books-Fiction pull down menu above. You'll also find entries related to Blue Hole--including hearing the music behind the book-- on Joy's blog at bottom right of this page.

Intrigued with the Underground Railroad or the Great Hunger of Ireland or Pre-Civil War Boston and Charleston? STEAL AWAY is a Novel-in-Progress

On a sultry Charleston, South Carolina, morning in 1822, two boys, one a slave and the other the son of a white prostitute, witness the hanging of slave revolt leader Denmark Vesey. The consequences of that day, brutal and far-reaching, set the tumultuous course for their adult lives. The toughest thing about writing Steal Away? The actual history is too incredible. Joy perpetually feels inadequate to the task: Slaves mailing themselves to the North, or escaping, disguised, in plain view. Secret networks of abolitionists. Slaveholders riven with guilt. Cities teeming with new ideas, inventions, excitement--and a world of new problems. Ordinary people staking their lives on what they believe America is--or ought to become.