About Ardella Garland Nom De Plume of bestselling novelist Yolanda Joe Yolanda Joe is a Chicago native, raised on the south side by her maternal grandparents. Her working class family was influential in pushing her to achieve her goals of being a journalist and a novelist. Ms. Joe received a four-year academic scholarship to Yale University, from which she graduated in 1984 with a BA in English Literature. During her stint at Yale she studied under well-known scholar Henry Louis Gates and received a fellowship to study British Literature at Oxford in England. She went on to receive an MS in Broadcasting from the Columbia School of Journalism. Yolanda Joe began her... Read full bio