Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is one of America's most versatile, serious writers, the author of a number of distinguished books in several genres, all published within the past twenty-five years. In addition to numerous novels and short story collections, she has published several volumes of poetry, several books of plays, five books of literary criticism, and the book-length essay On Boxing. John Gardner has called her "one of the greatest writers of our time."

Her writing has earned her much praise and many awards, including the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in short fiction, 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 National Book Award for her novel Them, and in 1978, membership in the American Academy-Institute. What I Lived For was nominated for the 1995 PEN/Faulkner Award.

Often Oates's "vision" is that of a highly complex America populated with presumably ordinary families who experience common yet intense emotions and relationships and who frequently encounter violence. Her ambition is to create a fictional world that mirrors the ambiguity and felt experience of the real world of her time.

On the occasion of the publication of You Must Remember This, critic James Atlas called it "an American Masterpiece." Also said of Oates's writing in general: "The engine of Oates's immense talent is powered by a fecund imagination and an immense knowledge of literature, as all her writing -- both fiction and nonfiction -- made plain."

Ms. Oates's recent works include Broke Heart Blues (Dutton) 1999; Gemini: An American Epic (Harper Collins) 1999; My Heart Laid Bare (Dutton), The Collector of Hearts (Dutton), Gothic short stories, and New Plays (Ontario Review Press) all in 1998; Man Crazy (Dutton) 1997; Double Delight (Dutton) 1997; We Were The Mulvaneys (Dutton) 1996; Tenderness (Ontario

Review 1996; Will You Always Love Me? And Other Short Stories by Joyce Carol Oates (1996); and Zombie, a bold and thrilling exploration into the life and mind of a serial killer (1995).

A novella, First Love,(Ecco Press) was also published in 1996.

Come Meet Muffin! (Ecco Press), a children's book, was published in 1998.

Black Water was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

Recent works of poetry include The Time Traveler (Dutton) and The Invisible Woman (Ontario Review).

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.