Joyce Mills is a writer, retired public health nurse, and advocate for transformative social and political change. 

Born in Canada to a traveling family of artists, she grew up as a self-described world citizen before landing in the United States at age eleven following her father's sudden death in France.

Her forthcoming memoir, Letters from Falling Empires: An American Daughter Speaks, grows out of a life spent on the front lines of both caregiving and civic change. 

The book traces a daughter’s reckoning with her family’s mythology and with the American Dream itself: an artist mother chasing ideals, a pacifist father lost too soon, and a child who came of age amid desegregation fights, the Vietnam War, and the promises and betrayals of U.S. empire. 

At its heart, the memoir asks: When the old order is crumbling, what allows a person—especially a woman raised between countries and generations—to act with agency and hope? 

Looking back from today’s unsettled present to the upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s, Joyce reflects on how personal and collective histories can become sources of resilience and imagination for a disrupted future.

Mills worked as a public health nurse for over two decades—as much by necessity as by choice—serving homeless populations, teaching community health nursing at UCSF and other universities, and developing continuing education programs for the California Nurses Association. 

She holds an MS in Community Health Nursing from UCSF and an MA in U.S. History with a focus on gender from San Francisco State University.

Throughout her career, she has been a speaker and advocate for healthcare justice, addressing audiences from the American Medical Women's Association to grassroots organizing spaces.

Her work emerges from a deep engagement with the question of how we live and love without despairing of half-measures, both our own and society's. 

Her prose has appeared in A Wiggle and a Prayer: True Stories from the Berkeley Public Library Memoir Writers (2017) and Shut Up and Write Magazine (2017). 

Her poetry has been published in Writing on the Edge: Creative Writings by Seniors (2018), The People's Tribune (2020), and the ebooks Word Whisperers and Sheltering in Poetry (2020), housed in the Oakland History Center's California Revealed Archive. 

She writes for generations facing today's struggles over America's direction, offering hard-won insights about human agency, collective loss, and the origins of hope in disrupted times. 

Mills lives in Oakland, California, where a 1987 housing takeover first sparked the inner journey that became her memoir.