Joyce Carol Oates is the author of some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award, and the New York Times bestseller, The Falls. She is also the author of several critically acclaimed collections of short fiction and essays, plays, and poetry. Writing for The Nation, critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. said of her work, “A future archeologist equipped only with her oeuvre could easily piece together the whole of postwar America.” Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University. The prolific Oates has mentored many other major writers. Her forthcoming novel is titled The Accursed.
Robert Hass is the former Poet Laureate of the United States. His works include Field Guide, Sun Under Wood, The Apple Trees at Olema, and Time and Materials, which won both the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize.