Teaching

As a teacher, Joy Castro focuses on blending deep creative work with rigorous critical interrogation and interpretation. At the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, her courses range from Autobiographical Writing, Women's Literature, U.S. Latina/o Studies, and Chicana/o Literature at the undergraduate level to Women's Modernism and Writing Literary Nonfiction: Memoir at the graduate level. In 2011, she received the UNL Annis Chaikin Sorensen Award for Distinguished Teaching.

At Wabash College, a men's liberal arts college, she taught fiction writing, critical theory, British and U.S. modernism, a Faulkner seminar, and the Harlem Renaissance.

She has also led creative writing classes and workshops at the Solstice Low-Residency MFA Program, the Nebraska Summer Writers Conference , the Macondo Writers' Workshop, and the University of Iowa MFA in Nonfiction Program.

Joy's students have won first prize in the Atlantic Monthly Student Writing Contest and have had work published or accepted by journals including Fourth Genre, Hawai'i Pacific Review, Western Humanities Review, Water~Stone Review, and Brevity.