Joyce Marcel is an award-winning professional journalist and columnist who lives in southern Vermont. She writes about Vermont art, culture, politics, business and music, plus her 94-year-old mother who lives in Florida.
For the past 21 years, she has written for Vermont Business Magazine, the state’s only news magazine. In 2000 she won the Gold Award for Reporting from the Association of Area Business Publications.
She currently writes a monthly op-ed column for Windham County’s new weekly newspaper, The Commons; it also appears on-line at The American Reporter (american-reporter.com). She also writes about art and music for The Commons and for Southern Vermont Arts & Living, a quarterly magazine.
For the better part of the past two decades, her popular weekly op-ed column — which started as a music column but couldn’t stay away from cultural and political issues — appeared in the Brattleboro (Vt.) Reformer as well as online at The American Reporter and often at Common Dreams (commondreams.org). It also frequently appeared in print in The Progressive Populist. Widely read and discussed, it made her an influential voice in Windham County affairs and a popular guest every other Thursday on WKVT’s “Live and Local” with Steve West.
In 2006, a self-published collection of her Reformer columns, “A Thousand Words or Less: Favorite Columns 1996-2005″” received appreciative reviews.
From 1994 to 1999, she was a pop music critic for what was then called the Springfield (Mass.) Union-News and Sunday Republican. (circ. 100,000.) (It’s now called the Springfield Republican.) She wrote feature stories, interviewed musicians and celebrities and reviewed concerts in an area covering New Haven, Boston, Springfield and Western Massachusetts. From 1996 to 1998, her column “Culture Shock” led the Sunday Republican’s Leisure section.
From 1997 to 2000 she covered Vermont and Northern New England for The Boston Globe. In 1999 and 2000 she also wrote for The Boston Globe Magazine.
Her travel writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the New York Post, the Orlando Sentinel, Newsday, the Providence (R.I.) Journal and the Springfield Union-News.
Her feature stories have appeared in Vermont Magazine, Vermont Life Magazine and as far afield as Feminina Magazine in South Africa and The Arab News in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
She has taught journalism at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst Division of Continuing Education from 2001 to 2003.
Before becoming a journalist, Joyce was a costume designer in San Francisco and New York. She also traveled extensively in South and Central America and taught English as a Second Language for four years in Panama. She has a B.A. degree in theater from Brooklyn College, most of a M.A. in theatrical costume design from Indiana University and a M.A. in international management from the School for International Training in Brattleboro, Vt.
Her husband of 21.5 years, journalist Randy Holhut, is the news editor of The Commons.