Aby May Joyner, a Junior at Washington and Lee University, majors in Creative Writing and Strategic Communication and minors in Studio Art. A photographer, writer, and creative marketer raised in Massachusetts, her work explores the connection between people, place, and feeling. She pairs photography and the power of words to capture people authentically.
Creative Work
The author of Delicate Perspectives (2023) and Womanhood Elucidated (2024), her collections center on girlhood, identity, and the complexity of women’s lives, built through real conversations and portraits of people she meets. Her most recent book, Where The Root Speaks (2026), follows her journey across New England as she visits the homes of influential poets, using both photography and poetry to find where inspiration comes from and the meaning behind place.
Currently interning for Sally Mann, named “America’s Best Photographer” by Time magazine, she strengthens her skills in visual design, creative processes, and attention to detail. Looking to Mann’s photography and writing since she started shooting in 2022 has helped her improve her ability to encapsulate the spirit of life through portraiture and poetry. Now that she has the opportunity to work closely with Mann to help her with whatever she needs on a weekly basis — editing, archiving, printing, scanning, planning, etc. — she does what people most often note of her character since childhood: stays abundantly curious, passionate, and works to grow as much as possible.
Working in New England and the American South, she roots her creative process in slowing down, resisting passivity, talking to people, and noticing small moments. She often approaches strangers or nature, listens to them, photographs them, and then writes about them, honoring their humanity.
She strives to make people feel alive and unified in the ever-so-fleeting, ever-so-divisive, distracted now.
Strategic Communications
As the Summer 2026 creative marketing intern at Fidelity Investments, she developed an empowering campaign strategically communicating Fidelity’s resources to college-aged women. Aby presented her intensive research, powerful strategy, and final executions, including a storyboard and script for a hero video, college campus marketing, an outbound email, and social posts to Fidelity executives, who implement some of her creative work today. Fidelity thinks highly of her strategic communication work for her ability to make complex and difficult ideas positive and encouraging through creativity.
On campus, she founded the Women’s Wrestling Club and the Poetry Club, enhancing vulnerability and women’s confidence. Aby clearly wants people to feel seen and enjoys telling meaningful stories across words, images, and campaigns. She works as a photographer for Communications and Public Affairs and contributes to InGeneral Magazine, telling stories about people and community. She interned at Shenandoah Magazine, where she evaluated poetry, copyedited submissions, and helped run the 75th-anniversary event. Her work has received a Scholastic Gold Key, the SSA Award, and the Kendrick Award, among other accolades.
“Aby May Joyner is both map maker and traveling bard… an atlas of sight and feeling, vision and yet-deeper vision.”
— Leah Naomi Green, Poet
“One can easily recognize in Aby’s portraits that her subjects trust her completely… her work reveals something deeper than surface appearances.”
— David Oxton, Photographer
“Joyner creates a combined art form… capturing a moment or a person and their essence.”
— Laura Lemon, Writer & Editor
Copyright © Abigail Joyner. All Rights Reserved.