Joyce Carol Oates is the author of multiple best-selling novels and critically-acclaimed collections of short fiction, as well as essays, plays, poetry, and a memoir.  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.”

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.