Joyce McDonald was born on August 4th in San Francisco, California. She grew up in Chatham, New Jersey, but she's lived in many places. Joyce received her bachelor of arts and master of arts degrees from the University of Iowa and then moved to New Jersey to attend Drew University, where she earned her PhD. Her dissertation “The Incommunicable Past:  Willa Cather's Pastoral Modes and the Southern Literary Imagination” won the the Helen LePage and William Hale Chamberlain Prize awarded for the Ph.D. dissertation that is “singularly distinguished by creative thought and excellent prose style. Joyce is currently is on the faculty of the Spaulding University Brief-residency MFA in Writing Program in Louisville, Kentucky, and she has served for 12 years on the Rutgers University Council of Children's Literature.

Joyce's first book, a middle-grade novel called Mail-Order Kid, was published by G.P. Putnam's Sons in 1988. She has written a picture book, Homebody (Putnam), middle grade novels, and young adult novels. Shades of Simon Gray is a suspenseful mystery about a 16-year-old who is convinced to hack into his school's computer and then crashes his car into the ancient oak tree in town that is famous as the place a young boy was hung two hundred years ago. When Simon, trapped in a coma, meets that murderer from the town's past, the suspense is intense and nail-biting.

Today Joyce lives with her husband in Pennsylvania, where she continues to write and teach.