Joyce Carol Oates

Readings and Reflections: An Evening with Joyce Carol Oates
Monday, February 25, 5:30 PM
Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum

The New York Times bestselling author, Joyce Carol Oates is an acclaimed author of several literary genres. She is widely regarded as a contemporary and versatile writer, who has authored more than forty novels, numerous dramas, short stories, works of poetry and non-fiction. She has also served as an editor and a literary critic. A Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, Oates previously taught at the University of Detroit and the University of Windsor. She has often written about her humble working–class upbringing in her fiction, expressing nostalgia about her growing days in the countryside outside of Lockport, New York, where she attended a 'one-room' school. Interestingly, she started writing stories since she was fourteen year old with a typewriter her grandmother had gifted her.

The list of awards Joyce has received is almost as long as her bibliography. In 1970, she won the National Book Award for one of her masterpieces, them. (She’s been nominated for this prize no less than five times!) In 1990, she received the Rea Award for the Short Story and, in 1996, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Art of the Short Story. In 2002, she won the Carl Sandburg Award for Lifetime Achievement. The following year, she won the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement. In 2007, she received the American Humanist Association’s Humanist of the Year Award. In 2010, she received the National Book Critics Circle’s Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2011, President Barack Obama presented her with the National Humanities Medal “for her contributions to American letters.” And in 2012, Princeton University bestowed on her the Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities.