Joyce Millman is a freelance writer living in the San Francisco area. Her television and music reviews and essays about pop culture have appeared in the New York Times, Variety, the Boston Phoenix and Salon.com, among other publications.
She was a founding staff member of Salon, and its first television critic, as well as a co-editor of the Salon parenting site "Mothers Who Think." Before that, she was the television columnist for the San Francisco Examiner, where she was a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism, in 1989 and 1991. She began her career in her home town of Boston, as a rock critic for the Boston Phoenix. She holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from Boston University.
Joyce is the co-author of the book The Great Snape Debate (BenBella/Borders, 2007), which examines the enigmatic Professor Snape and his pivotal role in the highly-anticipated final chapter in J. K Rowling's saga, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Joyce wrote the chapters "In Defense of Snape," "Snape the Hero," "Snape the Villain" and several (often humorous) speculations on such subjects as, "Why Is Snape's Hair So Greasy?" and "What's on Snape's iPod?" The Great Snape Debate is available exclusively at Borders and Waldenbooks, and was the focal point of the booksellers' "Severus Snape: Friend or Foe?" campaign in advance of Deathly Hallows.
She has also contributed original essays to the following titles in the SmartPop anthology series published by BenBella Books: What Would Sipowicz Do?: Race, Rights and Redemption in NYPD Blue; Alias Assumed: Sex, Lies and SD-6; Flirting with Pride and Prejudice; Mapping the World of Harry Potter ; Getting Lost: Survival, Baggage and Starting Over in J.J. Abrams' Lost ; the Veronica Mars anthology Neptune Noir and House Unauthorized.
In addition, two of her first-person essays on parenting appear in the Salon anthology Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-Life Parenthood (Washington Square Press, 1999). And her widely-read 1986 Boston Phoenix essay on Madonna, "Primadonna," has been reprinted in both Adam Sexton's anthology Desperately Seeking Madonna (Delta Press, 1993) and William McKeen and Peter Guralnick's anthology Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay (Norton, 2000).
Joyce apologizes for the delay in creating this web archive. To be honest, she'd rather be playing her guitar. So, while she's doing that, read on ...