Joyce Milambiling’s published work includes articles, essays, and book chapters on multilingualism, language teaching, and social issues. She has a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center and an M.A.in Scandinavian from the University of California at Berkeley. Shortly before retiring from the University of Northern Iowa, she discovered some letters written in 1918 from an immigrant student to her English teacher. This was enough to make Joyce fall in love with archival research, and so she made the leap from linguistics to history.

Her book, Skyscraper Settlement: The Many Lives of Christodora House, delves into the history of a settlement house in New York City and chronicles the settlement house movement in the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th century. That book is a springboard for her novel in progress that fills in gaps in the life of Ellen Gould, a volunteer teacher at Christodora House. This work tells a story that took place during an era in which industrialization, shifting class differences, and the influx of working women to urban centers were transforming society.

Joyce lives outside Greensboro, North Carolina.