Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates grew up in a working-class farming community and became interested in reading at an early age. She was the first in her family to complete high school, and after attending Syracuse University, she published her first book in 1962. Oates is well known for her prolific output—she has written over forty novels, as well as a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. On average, she publishes two books a year. Frequent topics in her work include rural poverty, sexual abuse, racial and class tensions, and female childhood and adolescence. Violence is also a constant theme, with occasionally supernatural underpinnings. She has won several awards including the National Book Award, the O. Henry Award, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature award. In 1962, Oates moved to Detroit where she began teaching creative writing at the University of Detroit. She lived there until 1968; influenced by the Vietnam War and the 1967 Detroit race riots, she then moved to Canada with her husband and began teaching at the University of Windsor in Ontario. In 1978, she moved to Princeton, New Jersey, and taught at Princeton University for 35 years, retiring in 2014. She has also taught creative writing at UC Berkeley.