Joy Notoma

Joy Notoma is a fiction writer, essayist, and journalist. Her writing, which examines grief, estrangement, and Black girlhood, is inspired by her South Carolinian and Nigerian roots.

Joy is a 2023 Sustainable Arts Foundation awardee, a 2022 Kimbilio fellow, and a 2023 Roots.Wounds.Words fiction fellow and an alum of Tin House and The Hurston/Wright Foundation.

Her writing has been featured or is forthcoming in Epiphany Zine, The Woodward Review, Longreads, Catapult, Ploughshares and elsewhere.

Joy hosts Emerging Writers Community Podcast, where she interviews early career BIPOC creative writers in a roundtable discussion with participants. The podcast is a gathering place for early career writers or “emerging writers” to talk about craft, process, and staying inspired. 

Joy also started the first ever Europe Chapter of Women Who Submit, an organization that empowers women and non-binary writers to submit literary work for publication. 

She is a workshop leader with New York Writers Coalition and Crow Collective, and leads in-person creative writing workshops in Toulouse, France where she lives. She holds an MA in journalism from The Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.  She is an MFA candidate in fiction at The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College where she is a Holden Scholar.  

Selected publications: 

• Grieve Not (fiction)

• To Embody This Target (fiction)

• The Civil Rights Activist Whose Spirituality Helped Me Find My Own (creative non-fiction)

• She Opened a Sex Store for Women, Then the Backlash Started (reporting)

• Benin’s Startups Overcome Scammer Stigma to Hit the Global Market (reporting)

• When to Throw a Goodbye Party (creative non-fiction)