<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Joyce Carol Oates (June 16, 1938 - ) is an American writer, editor. She has a BA in English, Syracuse University (valedictorian); M.A. in English, University of Wisconsin. Oates is recognized as a major American literary figure and has used her prestigious position as an important mainstream author to both demonstrate and encourage horror as literature. Beyond her own fiction, Oates has influenced and helped define modern horror through her critical writing and editing.

Her short stories, frequently published in fantasy and horror anthologies, have brought her work to genre readers. Oates's body of work is immense -- over 50 novels, hundreds of short stories compiled into over two dozen collections, dozens of essay and poetry collections, works for younger readers, and more. In her dark works one can see love, fear, violence and its effect on ordinary people; the machinations of evil; alienation, fragmentation, violation, and abuse -- all combined with a constant theme of survival and redemption.

She used Gothicism, which she sees as having roots in psychological realism, in Bellefleur (1980) and three related novels. The richly written Bellefleur is set in a haunted mansion, full of grotesque characters and [[replete with ghosts and angels. Bloodsmoor Romance (1982), involves spiritualism, Mysteries Of Winterthurn (1984) is a novel of mystery and murder; My Heart Laid Bare (1998) is a sinister tale of crime, transgression, and tragedy.

In a more obviously realistic mode, Oates examined overwhelming violence in Black Water (1992), written from the point of view of a young female victim, and Zombie (1995), written from the viewpoint of a sexually savage psychopath.

Oates excels in the short form as well and genre readers might especially note collections Haunted: Tales Of The Grotesque (1994), The Collector Of Hearts: New Tales Of The Grotesque (1998), Faithless: Tales Of Transgression (2001), and The Female Of The Species: Tales Of Mystery And Suspense (2006).

Oates has authored more than three dozen produced theatrical works including the libretto for Black Water, adapted from the novel of the same name (composer: John Duffy). Eight of her works have been adapted (by others) and produced for television or film. Among her 17 anthologies are Tales Of H.P. Lovecraft (1998), American Gothic Tales (1996), and Night Walks: A Bedside Companion (1982).

Joyce Carol Oates is the only woman to be honored with the HWA's Bram Stoker Award for Life Achievement (1994), and was also awarded a 1996 Stoker Superior Achievement in a novel for Zombie (which also received the 1996 Boston Book Review's Fisk Fiction Prize). Oates is a recipient of the National Book Award, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, the O. Henry Prize for Continued Achievement in the Short Story, the Elmer Holmes Bobst Lifetime Achievement Award in Fiction, the Rea Award for the Short Story, and in 1978, membership in the American Academy Institute. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member since 1978 of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.