About Joan Weimer

Joan Weimer's memoir Back Talk: Teaching Lost Selves to Speak was published by Random House and brought out in paperback by the University of Chicago Press. The book won a star from Kirkus Reviews as a "powerful, inspiring memoir written with humor, insight, and a gripping gift for detail." With playwright Paullette MacDougal, Weimer adapted Back Talk into a play which critics found "fierce and funny," "superbly and subtly crafted...a richly satisfying intellectual and emotional experience."

Weimer is also the editor of Jewish Renewal in America: 22 Stories of Transformation, Spirit and Community and Women Artists, Women Exiles: 'Miss Grief' and Other Stories by Constance Fenimore Woolson. With David Weimer, she edited the award-winning anthology Literature of America. Her many published articles include three on the power of mythic figures like the Black Madonna on our emotional and spiritual lives. She won the McGinness Award for nonfiction and was selected as the Frey Foundation Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of North Carolina.

Weimer earned her doctorate at Rutgers and is a professor emerita at Drew University where she taught American literature and nonfiction writing. She is a dynamic and compelling speaker who has given talks and writing workshops at bookstores, colleges, conferences, churches, synagogues and women's centers around the country.