Joyce Carol Oates was born in Lockport, New York. After graduating from high school, she attended Syracuse University and then earned her master of arts from the University of Wisconsin–Madison before becoming a full-time writer. In 1963, she published her first book, the short story collection By the North Gate, and in 1964, when she was twenty-six years old, her first novel, With Shuddering Fall. Oates has written over forty works, many of which have won awards, including the National Book Award for them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, four Bram Stoker Awards, a World Fantasy Award, the National Humanities Medal, the Norman Mailer Prize for Lifetime Achievement, and the Stone Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement. Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), Blonde (2000), and Lovely, Dark, Deep (2014) were Pulitzer Prize finalists, and her 1996 novel We Were the Mulvaneys was a New York Times bestseller. Under the pen names Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly, she published eleven psychological suspense novels, including Snake Eyes (1992), Double Delight (1997), and Starr Bright Will Be with You Soon (1999). While writing and publishing books, Oates taught at the University of Windsor in Canada from 1968 to 1978, and then moved to New Jersey, where she currently teaches in Princeton University’s creative writing program as the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities. She also teaches creative writing courses at New York University, Stanford University, and the University of California, Berkeley.
Joyce Carol Oates is the author of over seventy books encompassing novels, poetry, criticism, story collections, plays, and essays. Her novel Them won the National Book Award in Fiction in 1970. Oates has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for more than three decades and currently holds the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professorship at Princeton University.