Senior editor Joy de Menil joined the Atlantic staff in 2005. Previously Editorial Director at William Heinemann in London and a Senior Editor at Random House in NY, she published a number of acclaimed books, including Margaret MacMillan's Paris 1919, Milt Bearden and James Risen's The Main Enemy, Nancy Milford's Savage Beauty, and Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, a #1 New York Times bestseller. In the acknowledgements for his book A Middle East Mosaic, the preeminent scholar Bernard Lewis wrote that Joy's "combination of a sharp mind and gentle manner, of vision and vigilance, have made this a much better book than it would otherwise have been."

Joy grew up in Paris until the age of ten. Before coming to The Atlantic in Washington, D.C., she spent six months living in Pakistan and two years in London. She also spent a year before college (Harvard) traveling overland through Africa, from Morocco to Zimbabwe.