Joan Dunn Walsh

Joan Dunn Walsh died on September 22, 2024 in Washington, D.C. after a short illness. She was 97 years old. Her husband, George, died four days earlier, on September 18, at the age of 93, after 63 years of marriage. Her brother Philip Dunn died in 2011. She is survived by her children Grail Sipes (husband Christopher Sipes) and Simon Walsh (wife Jane Walsh) , and her grandchildren Mahon Walsh, Declan Walsh, Daniel Sipes and Amelia Sipes. She loved family, writing, poetry, Ireland, Trollope, Seamus Heaney and a good handbag.

Born in 1927 in Brooklyn, Joan Mary Dunn graduated from Marymount University and started her career in the 1950s as a high school English teacher at Brooklyn’s Lafayette High School. Four years later, she joined Time Magazine as a researcher. She also published a critique of educational standards, “Retreat from Learning,” which Time hailed as "an outraged indictment of modern educational theories from one who has seen them in action." After marrying George Walsh, a writer and publisher, and raising two children, Simon and Grail, she returned to Time as head of the magazine’s storied letters department, which each year answered thousands of letters from readers. She was the author of “Seen and Unseen,” a poetry collection, and many magazine articles and short stories, including “Johnny’s Dying,” which won The Virginia Quarterly Review’s Balch Award in 1980. Joan's kindness, empathy, humor and intelligence lit up the lives of her husband, her children and their families, and her many friends. We are forever grateful for the love she showed us every day, and she lives in our hearts always. “Never underestimate the good you do in this world,” she said on her 90th birthday. “I am grateful to God to have lived so long and to have a heart filled with joy.”

Funeral services will be held at Holy Trinity in Washington, D.C. on Nov. 18 at 10:30 am.