Joyce Dyer

Her father, Thomas William Coyne, was a supervisor for the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company and her mother clerked for the Akron Board of Education.

After completing her PhD, Dyer taught English at Lake Forest College, Western Reserve Academy, and then Hiram College, where she was the first director of the Lindsay-Crane Center for Writing and Literature and held the John S. Kenyon Chair in English for many years.

Dyer's first book, The Awakening: A Novel of Beginnings, was an academic study of late-19th-century author Kate Chopin.

Gum-Dipped attempts to reconstruct the centrality of the rubber industry to midcentury Akron, Ohio through Dyer's relationship to her father.

Finally, from 2011 to 2021, Dyer wrote Pursuing John Brown: On the Trail of a Radical Abolitionist, a mix of memoir, biography, public history, and travel writing that analyzes the troubling life of its eponymous figure.