Description

“Inspiration”

I will range through a number of classic writers– Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Henry James, and others — to discuss the wellsprings of their creativity and to advance a (personal) theory of inspiration.

Meet Joyce Carol Oates

An international literary icon, Joyce Carol Oates has received or been nominated for more than fifty prestigious literary awards.

Her novel, Them, received the National Book Award in 1969. She has received the O. Henry Award for her short stories twice, and has been nominated four times for the Pulitzer Prize. She received the National Humanities Medal in 2010, and the Stone Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement in 2012.

She writes novels, short stories, plays, poetry, and literary criticism. Oates teaches creative writing at Princeton University, where she has been a professor since 1978. For more than 25 years, odds makers and critics have named Oates as a “favorite” to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Oates writes all of her works in longhand, working from 8 AM to 1 PM every day, and then again for three hours in the evening. She is a dedicated runner, and says she finds new ideas and solves problems with her writing as she runs.

Her husband of forty-seven years died suddenly of complications from pneumonia in 2008, when her grief interrupted her work. In 2009, she married her present husband, Charles Gross.