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May 18, 2011: Joyce Carol Oates
4:30 PM
International House Assembly Hall

JOYCE CAROL OATES
Three Times Nominated for a Nobel Prize

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 2005 Prix Femina, France’s literary prize for the best novel published in their country, 2004 Fairfax Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Literary Arts, 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. In 1999 she was nominated for the Nobel Prize for the third time.

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. Black Water was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In January 2001 We Were The Mulvaneys was selected as an Oprah Book of the Month. 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. Along with meeting with creative writing students, she has also met with theater students. Her plays have been collected in TWELVE PLAYS, THE PERFECTIONIST AND OTHER PLAYS, and NEW PLAYS (1998). 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. Recent works of poetry include The Time Traveller (Dutton) and The Invisible Woman (Ontario Review). The Best American Essays of the Century (Houghton Mifflin) 2000, is edited by Joyce Carol Oates. “Here is the history of America told in many voices” she writes in her introduction of this collection of 55 essays by American writers.

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.  

 

Cosponsored by the the International House Global Voices Speaker Series, the Franke Institute for the Humanities, Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture, Division of the Humanities, and the Office of the Provost.