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Joyce Carol Oates Reading and Conversation February 19, 2019
Joyce Carol Oates is a National Book Award-Winning novelist, poet, playwright and essayist. Writing in The Nation, critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. said, “A future archeologist equipped only with her oeuvre could easily piece together the whole of postwar America.”
Best known for her fiction, Oates’ novels include Them, which won the National Book Award; Blonde, a bold reimagining of the inner life of Marilyn Monroe; The Falls, which won the France’s Prix Femina; The Gravedigger’s Daughter andLittle Bird of Heaven, each set in upstate New York; and We Were the Mulvaneys, which follows the disintegration of an American family and which became a bestseller after being selected by Oprah’s Book Club. Since 1963, over forty of Oates’s books have been included on the New York Times list of notable books of the year.
She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2010, President Obama awarded her the National Humanities Medal.