Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is one of America's most versatile serious writers. Her 112th book will be published in April, Wild Nights: Stories about the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemmingway (Ecco, 2008)— a collection of stories reimagining the final days of five major American writers, told in first-person evocations of those writers' voices. Her newest novel is My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike (Ecco, June 2008), inspired by an unsolved American true crime mystery.

Born in upstate New York in 1938, Joyce Carol Oates received her B.A. from Syracuse University in 1960 and her M.A. from the University of Wisconsin in 1961. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University.

Links

For a comprehensive review of Oates's works, visit her official website: http://jco.usfca.edu/index.html

The Kentucky Women Writers Conference has prepared a "Guide to Teaching Joyce Carol Oates" for teachers seeking guidance in choosing titles for a course syllabus. Click here to access it.

Selected Works and Awards
Oates's writing has earned her much praise and many awards, including the National Book Award for the novel them (1969). In 2007 two of her works were nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Gravedigger's Daughter (Harper Collins) in fiction, and The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982 (Ecco Press) in memoir. We Were the Mulvaneys (1996) was an Oprah pick in 2001. What I Lived For was nominated for the 1995 PEN/Faulkner Award. Black Water (1992) was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

She has also been awarded the 2005 Prix Femina for the best novel published that year in France, the 2004 Fairfax Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Literary Arts, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in short fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the O'Henry Prize for Continued Achievement in the Short Story, and membership since 1978 in the American Academy-Institute of Arts and Letters.

Joyce Carol Oates is also a playwright whose plays have been performed widely in the United States and abroad. She has been involved with student productions and readings of her plays at Northwestern University, the University of Pennsylvania, Williams College, Brown University, and the Los Angeles Theatre Academy. In spring 1999 her full-length play The Passion of Henry David Thoreau was produced by the Northwestern University Drama School. She also wrote the libretto for an opera made of her novel Black Water, most recently performed at L.A. Theater Works.