About the Author

Joy Jordan-Lake’s varied–and admittedly odd–professional experience has included working as a college professor, author, waitress, journalist, director of a program for homeless families, university chaplain, and –the job title that remains her personal favorite–head sailing instructor.

After earning a bachelors degree from Furman University and a masters from a theological seminary, Joy re-located to Boston, Massachusetts, area where she earned a masters and a Ph.D. in English Literature from Tufts University, and specialized in the role of race and religion in 19-century American fiction.

While in New England, she founded a food pantry targeting low-income and homeless families, served on the staff of a multi-ethnic church in Cambridge, worked as a free-lance journalist, and became a Baptist chaplain at Harvard. Her first book, Grit and Grace: Portraits of a Woman’s Life (Wheaton Literary Series)(Harold Shaw Publishers, 1997), was a collection of stories, poems and essays which The Chicago Tribune described this way: “Written with much heart and wit, this little gem of a book touches on the ordinary and profound experiences that make up a woman’s life . . . a poignant and satisfying collection . . . funny and sad, inspiring and awfully surprising.”

Joy’s second book, Whitewashing Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Nineteenth-Century Women Novelists Respond to Stowe (Vanderbilt University Press, 2005) continued her doctoral dissertation work, exploring the inter-weavings of literature, theology, and race in American culture.

During this period, life for Joy and her husband, Todd Lake, was becoming increasingly chaotic with two careers, numerous re-locations for Todd’s work, two young biological children and the adoption of a baby girl from China. Joy’s nearly-manic need to ask everyone around her about how they managed–or not–to balance kids and career led to her third book, Working Families: Navigating the Demands and Delights of Marriage, Parenting, and Career (WaterBrook/ Random House, 2007). Publishers Weekly called the book, “refreshing for its social conscience,” and written with “sharp humor and snappy prose.”

In its review of Joy’s fourth book, Why Jesus Makes Me Nervous: Ten Alarming Words of Faith (Paraclete Press, 2007), Publishers Weekly again praised the author: “A professor at Belmont University and a former Baptist chaplain at Harvard University , the author mines her personal history…to illumine and interpret ideas such as…hope. Sometimes wry, occasionally stern, Jordan-Lake, with a touch of Southern gothic sensibility…has a gift for welcoming, lucid and insightful prose….”

Joy’s first novel, Blue Hole Back Home: A Novel, won the 2009 national Christy Award for first novel, and was selected as the 2009 Common Book for Baylor University.  Inspired by actual events from her own teenage years, explores the tensions and eventual violence that erupt in a small, all-white Appalachian town when a Sri Lankan family moves in. Ultimately, Blue Hole Back Home is a story not only of the devastating effects of racial hatred and cowardice, but more centrally, a celebration of courage, confrontation and healing. Blue Hole Back Home is increasingly being chosen as classroom and summer reading at various public and private high school, middle schools, colleges and universities.

Having taught at universities in Massachusetts, North Carolina and Texas, Joy Jordan-Lake currently teaches part time at Belmont University in Tennessee. In addition to her time writing and in the classroom, she is a frequent speaker at retreats, workshops and conferences. Residing just south of Nashville, she and her husband share life with their three magnificentchildren, as well as the family’s sweet, needy Golden Retriever and two cats.

With friends and fellow readers, Joy values the chances to think about stories–in great literature, in scriptures, in creative writing workshops–with friends and fellow readers, and consider how stories challenge, disturb, inspire and change the way we see the world.

Please feel free to contact Joy directly: joyjordanlake@aol.com

  • Connect with Joy

  • Some Favorite Quotes on the Writing Life:

    "People without hope do not write novels. Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I’m always highly irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it’s very shocking to the system. If the novelist is not sustained by a hope of money, then he must be sustained by a hope of salvation, or he simply won’t survive the ordeal."
    --Flannery O’Connor

    "You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club."
    --Jack London

    "Writing has saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence." --Alice Walker

    "You must be prepared to work always without applause."
    --Ernest Hemingway

    "Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
    --Samuel Beckett

    "The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common."
    --Ralph Waldo Emerson

    "You keep putting one blessed word after another, just as you hear them, as they come to you."
    --Anne Lamott

    "Sing to God a new song."
    --Psalm 33:3

BLUE HOLE BACK HOME Chosen as Common Book, Classroom Text, Book Club Selection 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? On this site, you can SEE A TV 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.

Colleges, high schools, book clubs and community groups, we welcome you to contact the author about a possible visit--in-person, if possible, or Skype.

And WATCH FOR REGULAR GIVEAWAYS of Blue Hole, as well as Joy's other books, through the blog attached to this site.

TANGLED MERCY-a sequel to BLUE HOLE BACK HOME-and the first novel in the Charleston series

Before Jami Riggs learns—the day of her mother’s funeral—that she is inheriting a collapsing 19th-century inn at the southernmost tip of Charleston, South Carolina, she’d never intended to live outside the Appalachian mountains or to speak to her long-estranged father ever again. Knowing nothing of inn-keeping or of This Old House renovations and still in the midst of graduate studies in history, Jami sees no point in accepting the gift—which, it quickly appears, comes with all sorts of secrets and strings attached. But when old family friend Shelby Lenoir Maynard, back briefly on Pisgah Ridge for the funeral, offers to travel down to the Carolina Low Country with her, Jami surprises herself at how quickly she falls for Charleston’s charm and its quirky, colorful people. As she struggles to bring the inn—and her own life—back from rot and neglect, Jami stumbles on a series of disturbing discoveries, including a possible murder. When more “accidents” begin to occur, including the disappearance of an African-American toddler in whom a wealthy white matriarch has taken a peculiar interest, Jami suspects she has at her history-savvy fingertips old stories with new clues to the truth. If only she can sort out the bad guys from the good.

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