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Joyce Carol Oates

JOYCE CAROL OATES


NYS Writers Institute Reading - October 11, 1994.
She has been featured on our PBS series The Writer.

In addition, she will be giving a reading at our NYS Summer Writers Institute on July 17, 2000.

PROFILE
Joyce Carol Oates
is one of the United States most prolific and versatile contemporary writers. With a writing career that spans 25 years, Oates is the author of more than 70 books including novels, short story collections, poetry volumes, plays, literary criticism and essays. Her writing has earned her much praise and many awards including the National Book Award for her novel them (1969), the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy Institute of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the O'Henry Prize for Continued Achievement in the Short Story, the Elmer Holmes Bobst Lifetime Achievement Award in Fiction, the Rea Award for the Short Story, and in 1978, membership in the American Academy Institute. She also has been nominated twice for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Oates' early short story collections establishes her achievement in that genre and the literary world in general. Since then she has experimented with a number of genres and styles, earning praise for her versatility and varied productions, and criticism for the violence in her work and her prolific publishing. Her fictional world is violent and tragic; her characters, disturbed and unhappy, are often victims of their social milieu and emotional weakness.

We Were the Mulvaney'sOates' most recent fiction includes American Appetites (1989), Because it is Bitter, and Because it is My Heart (1990), The Rise of Life on Earth (1991), Heat: And Other Stories (1991), Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (1993), Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? (1993 reissue), Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque (1994), We Were the Mulvaneys (1996), and the forthcoming novel, Man Crazy.

Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University.

"She does not look like the author who will unmask the evil of everyday life, who will see allegory in the backyard and real darkness among the metaphoric daises. But she is" - Laura Kalpakian, The Southern Review on Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been: Selected Early Stories

"Foxfires is a wonderful book. It illuminates the importance of passion; of being passionately involved. . .The message is formidable--as formidable as Joyce Carol Oates' perceptive understanding and continuing adventure with language" - Barbara Rich, The Women's Review of Books on Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang

"Like the best of Oates, it probes the deeper recesses of personality, illuminating the way with flashes of eroticism and psychological mystery." - Peter Ross, Detroit News on Solstice

"[Oates's] particular genius is her ability to convey psychological states with unerring fidelity, and to relate the intense private experiences of her characters to the larger realities of American life." - Greg Johnson in Understanding Joyce Carol Oates

"Single-mindedness and efficiency rather than haste underlie her prolificacy; if the phrase 'woman of letters' existed, she would be, foremost in this country, entitled to it." - John Updike

Will You Always Love Me?Man Crazy

Previous Articles:
Writers Online Magazine Article
Albany Magazine Article
Marilyn from Within: Salon.com
Hear Joyce Carol Oates talk about her writing

 

 

 


For additional information, contact the Writers Institute at 518-442-5620 or online at https://www.albany.edu/writers-inst.