Internationally renowned writer Joyce Carol Oates will give a reading at Bard College on Monday, October 21, at 4:00 pm in the Chapel of the Holy Innocents. Oates is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award, the National Book Award, the Jerusalem Prize for Lifetime Achievement, the Prix Femina, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Art of the Short Story, and the Cino Del Duca World Prize, among many other honors. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national best sellers We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, and the New York Times best seller The Falls.
The reading, which is being presented as part of Bradford Morrow’s course on innovative contemporary fiction, is free and open to the public. With Morrow, Oates is co-editing Conjunctions:83, Revenants, The Ghost Issue, which will be published in November. Revenants will bring together fiction and poetry on the “unliving-living” by a wide array of esteemed writers, such as Margaret Atwood, Carmen Maria Machado, Ben Okri, Paul Tremblay, Stephen Graham Jones, Patricia Smith, Valerie Martin, Jonathan Carroll, Reggie Oliver, James Morrow, Can Xue, Brian Evenson, Paul Muldoon, and others.
Praise for Joyce Carol Oates
“It’s hard to think of another writer with as fecund and protean an imagination . . . who is surely on any shortlist of America’s greatest living writers.” —The New York Times Magazine
“Her short stories—she has won more Pushcart Prizes than any other writer—feel perfect, like tight circles around a kind of unspoken abyss.” —The New Yorker
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October 2, 2024
It is not a beautiful day in Mexico City unless you can see Popocatépetl. In this place, beauty is determined solely by whether or not the volcano breaches the nebulous smog like a visitation, by whether the eye can ascend its snow-covered face. When what was sensed but veiled yesterday is suddenly revealed today, it is, in the smallest way, a faith realized.
by Mary Jo Bang
September 25, 2024
My eyes were already fixed on the face
Of My Lady, and my mind with them—
All other thoughts had been wiped away.
She wasn’t smiling; instead, she began:
“If I were smiling, you’d become
Like Semele when she was turned to ashes,
Of My Lady, and my mind with them—
All other thoughts had been wiped away.
She wasn’t smiling; instead, she began:
“If I were smiling, you’d become
Like Semele when she was turned to ashes,
by Joe Fletcher
September 18, 2024
We were picnicking on the plains
when she emerged from the rushes.
She wore an apricot smock.
Her face was smeared with soot.
She said her name was Stina Groth.
A cloud of bats burst from the chimney
of a crumbling cottage behind her.
We asked her where home was.
She drew a circle in the silt with a twig.
when she emerged from the rushes.
She wore an apricot smock.
Her face was smeared with soot.
She said her name was Stina Groth.
A cloud of bats burst from the chimney
of a crumbling cottage behind her.
We asked her where home was.
She drew a circle in the silt with a twig.
The internationally renowned writer will read from her work.
Monday, October 21, 2024
4:00 pm – 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Chapel of the Holy Innocents