Joy Buchanan lives in Washington, D.C., where she is a Web content producer managing six Web sites for HealthCentral.com. She hires writers, edits copy and builds web sites related to various chronic conditions. She also writing freelance health articles for various publications including Essence Magazine and USA TODAY.

Prior to moving to Washington, she was the consumer health reporter for The Tennessean in Nashville. She's written stories about the HPV vaccine, about the importance of "pre-conception health" in the face of the state's dismal infant mortality rates, and about local people who have traveled overseas for surgery, including hip replacements, dental work and gastric bypass.

Prior to working for The Tennessean, Buchanan was the health and health care business reporter for the Daily Press in Newport News, Va., where she worked for two years. During that time she won an Excel award for her reporting on the rising rates of HIV among young, black women in the Hampton Roads region of Virginia. She also was part of the team that won a Virginia Press Association award for its reporting on the cost of being poor in Hampton Roads. Buchanan reported and wrote the piece about health care being more expensive for poor people and for those who lacked insurance.

Buchanan was an intern at the Los Angeles Times before working in Virginia and had been an intern reporter at Newsday in Melville, N.Y., during the summer of 2003.

She enrolled in the Medical Journalism Program at UNC-Chapel Hill in 2001. She wrote her master's thesis on how well North Carolina newspapers covered Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina's plan to convert from non-profit to for-profit status. Buchanan graduated with her M.A. in 2003.

During her time at UNC, Buchanan wrote for the Daily Tar Heel and The Chapel Hill Herald. She was a student reporter for the daily convention newspapers of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the National Association of Black Journalists and the Asian American Journalists Association. She was also an intern reporter and copy editor at The Herald in Rock Hill, S.C.

Buchanan was born in Brooklyn, N.Y. She got her B.A. in English from Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y., in 1999.