Joyce Carol Oates

Biography

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities the Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement from the National Book Critics Circle, the National Book Award, the Rae Award for the Short Story, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and she has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction four times. She is the author of dozens of books, including Blonde (Ecco, 2000), We Were the Mulvaneys (Dutton, 1996), Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (Dutton, 1990), You Must Remember This (Dutton, 1987), and them (Vanguard Press, 1969). Oates has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

See Work

POETRY / Autumn 1981

Boredom

By Joyce Carol Oates

There drifts the sky again,
Here, a single thought crawls slow as a flea.

 

 

CRITICISM / Spring 1987

Lost Creek

By Joyce Carol Oates

That shallow fast-running

  creek. White
rapids. The mud-colored
  water breaking
in anger brittle as
  bone.

 

POETRY / Autumn 1981

The Loss

By Joyce Carol Oates

The loss you can’t remember.
Crumbling walls, the mind’s stupor.
The haze at the horizon, the loss
indistinct, the stammered words
repeating themselves.
You can’t remember.

 

CRITICISM / Spring 1987

Island, 1949

By Joyce Carol Oates

Walking the crude rock
  dam above the
rapids. Why are you
  doing it?—
you might fall,
  drown,

POETRY / Autumn 1979

Last Things

By Joyce Carol Oates

Combing my hair, a sudden snarl
in the pink teeth.

How silent, death entering.

Winter 1988

Foster Home

By Joyce Carol Oates

When we first saw Mary Miles, I will say that our hearts went out to her—you always seem to know, in the very first instant, when a person, particularly a child, is going to mean something special to you. Not that Mary Miles was a child...