Joy Neaves entered publishing at Front Street, Inc., as assistant to the publisher soon after graduating from the University of North Carolina at Asheville with a degree in literature and language.

Joy has worked with novelists Andrea Cheng, Clay Carmichael, Emily Smith Pearce, Zu Vincent, Shenaaz Nanji, Mary Ann McGuigan, Lindsay Lee Johnson, and Adam Osterweil; the poet Charlotte Pomerantz; and the illustrators Craig Smith, David Udovic, and Rob Shepperson. She has overseen the publication of several internationally acclaimed authors, including the Australian writers Judith Clarke and Steven Herrick and the Swedish writer Per Nilsson. Joy was also the editor of Lemniscaat, an imprint in which picture books originally published in the Netherlands were translated from Dutch into English for an American audience.

She lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with her husband and their beautiful baby boy.