Joyce Carol Oates is an American writer born on June 16, 1938. Since publishing her first book in 1963, she has released 58 novels, numerous plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction.

Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000), as well as her short story collections The Wheel of Love (1970) and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014), were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has received numerous awards for her writing, including the National Book Award for her novel Them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize (2019).

Oates was a professor at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014 and is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor Emerita in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing. From 2016 to 2020, she was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where she taught short fiction during the spring semesters. She currently teaches at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. In 2016, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society.