Joy Johannessen has been an editor at Chelsea House, Grove Press, and Oxford University Press; a senior editor at HarperCollins Publishers; and the executive editor of Delphinium Books. She has worked with hundreds of writers, among them Rabih Alameddine, Dorothy Allison, Amy Bloom, Harold Bloom, Michael Cunningham, Larry Kramer, Ursula K. Le Guin, Arthur Miller, Ralph Nader, and Héctor Tobar. She is the co-editor, with Roxanne Coady, of The Book That Changed My Life: 71 Remarkable Writers Celebrate the Books That Matter Most to Them. She currently freelances.