We are honored to announce that Joyce Carol Oates will join us as a special guest this January 2009 for Session 2 of Historical Fiction and The Search for Truth, our 27th annual Seminar. Oates's readings and discussions during our 2007 event are memorable for many of us, and we enthusiastically welcome one of the great talents of our time back to the Seminar.

To call Oates prolific is akin to calling water wet. She is the author of more than 50 novels or novellas, more than 30 short story collections, a dozen collections of essays and nonfiction, several poetry collections, and several more collections of plays. She has published stories, essays, poems, and reviews in nearly every major (and minor) publication of the last 40 years; she has written psychological thrillers under the pseudonyms "Rosamond Smith" and "Lauren Kelly;" and an Oates book has been on The New York Times Notable Books of the Year list for 35 of the last 40 years. Oates has written about such diverse American icons as Emily Dickinson, Bob Dylan, Stephen King, Sylvia Plath, and extensively on the enigmatic boxer Mike Tyson, whose precipitous rise and squalid fall she covered in the 1980s and 1990s for publications including Life, The Village Voice, and Newsweek. In addition, she founded and edits The Ontario Review, serves as the Roger S. Berlind Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. She is a recipient of the National Book Award, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and the Prix Femina.

Oates's most recent book, Wild Nights!, is a collection of short stories about the last days of five American writers. Based on letters, diaries, biographies, unpublished manuscripts, and their own canonical works, Oates creates haunting final chapters for Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Henry James, and Ernest Hemingway. It is, wrote The New York Times, "a gem of a book ... about creativity and age and the complicated, anxiety-ridden relationship between the two."

Oates joins William Kennedy, Marilynne Robinson, Barry Unsworth, Russell Banks, and others on the list of speakers scheduled for Session 2 this January 15-18 2009. Session 1 is already sold out, and we expect Session 2 will also sell out early. Click here to register or call 1-888-293-9291.