Joy McCullough

Joy McCullough is an American author of fiction and drama for young adults whose work is characterized by its emotional depth, its formal inventiveness, and its commitment to centering the stories of women and girls who have been historically silenced or overlooked. McCullough draws on theatre and drama as influences on her work — she has written plays as well as novels — and this theatrical sensibility gives her fiction a heightened quality, a consciousness of voice and performance that shapes the way her characters present themselves and conceal themselves from the world and from each other.

McCullough’s debut novel, Blood Water Paint (2018), is a verse novel based on the life of Artemisia Gentileschi, the seventeenth-century Italian Baroque painter who was one of the first women to achieve recognition in an art world dominated by men, and who survived a sexual assault by her teacher only to be subjected to a humiliating public trial. McCullough tells Gentileschi’s story in lyrical verse interspersed with retellings of the biblical women Gentileschi painted — Judith, Susannah — drawing a powerful connection between those ancient stories of women who survived violence and the historical woman who gave them new artistic life. The novel received widespread critical acclaim and multiple starred reviews, and established McCullough as a formidable talent in verse fiction for young adults.

Her subsequent novels, including A Field Guide to Getting Lost and We Are the Fire, have further demonstrated her range and her consistent interest in stories about women’s resilience, agency, and survival in systems designed to diminish them. She writes across historical periods and genres while maintaining a recognizable thematic consistency, and her formal choices — verse, multiple timelines, theatrical structures — are always in service of the stories she is telling rather than deployed for their own sake.

McCullough’s writing is celebrated for the power and precision of its language, its moral seriousness, and its ability to make the past feel urgently relevant to contemporary readers. She lives in the Pacific Northwest and continues to write fiction that gives voice to stories of women whose courage and creativity have too often been overlooked by history and literature alike.