There is no more versatile and accomplished American writer than Joyce Carol Oates. The author of many books, Oates has penned bestselling novels, critically acclaimed collections of short fiction, as well as essays, plays, poetry, a recent memoir, A Widow’s Story, and an unlikely bestseller, On Boxing. Her remarkable literary industry – which includes work as an editor and anthologist – spans forms, themes, topics and genres. Writing in The Nation, critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. said, “A future archeologist equipped only with her oeuvre could easily piece together the whole of postwar America.” In 2010, reflecting the widespread esteem in which her work is held, President Barack Obama awarded Oates the National Humanities Medal.
 
Best known for her fiction, Oates’ novels include them, which won the National Book Award; Blonde, a bold reimagining of the inner life of Marilyn Monroe; The Falls, which won the France’s Prix Femina; The Gravedigger’s Daughter and Little Bird of Heaven, each set in upstate New York; and We Were the Mulvaneys, which follows the disintegration of an American family and which became a bestseller after being selected by Oprah’s Book Club. Her 2012 publications include the novels Daddy Love, and  Mudwoman, and Black Dahlia & White Rose, a collection of stories. Her novel, The Accursed, was released in March 2013. Her recent novel Carthage (January 2014) was a New York Times bestseller. Her new book is High Crime Area: Tales of Darkness and Dread (April 2014).
High Lonesome: New and Selected Stories 1966-2006 gathers Oates’ short fiction from earlier collections and includes eleven additional tales that further demonstrate the artistry and originality of a writer who “has imbued the American short story with an edgy vitality and raw social surfaces” (Chicago Tribune). Included in this volume is Oates’ most anthologized short story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Inspired by a song by Bob Dylan, it was later adapted as a film, Smooth Talk. It is one of a handful of Oates’ works made into films or movies for television. The latest adaption is Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (2012), by Palme d’Or winner Laurent Cantet.
 
Since 1963, forty of Oates’s books have been included on the New York Times list of notable books of the year. Among her many honors are two O. Henry Prizes and two Bram Stoker Awards, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, World Fantasy Award, and M. L. Rosenthal Award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In 2009, Oates was given the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Book Critics Circle. In 2012, she was awarded both the Mailer Prize for Lifetime Achievement and the PEN Center USA Award for Lifetime Achievement. In March 2014 she will be awarded the Poets & Writers Distinguished Lifetime Award.

Joyce Carol Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, and since 1978, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Brooks Haxton was born in Greenville, Mississippi, in 1950. His books include six collections of poems from Knopf, two book-length narrative poems, and one book of creative non-fiction. He has also written introductions to five books, essays, and the script of an American Masters Series film on Tennessee Williams, nationally broadcast on PBS. Since the mid-seventies, his poems and prose have been appearing in Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, and Paris Review. His work has been acclaimed by critics at All Things Considered, The New York Times, Newsweek Online, Time Magazine, The Village Voice, and The Washington Post. His four books of translations from Classical Greek, French, and German have included an alternate selection for the Book-of-the-Month Club. He has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. In 2013 the Fellowship of Southern Writers presented him with the Hanes Award, recognizing a distinguished body of work by a poet in mid-career. He lives with his wife and children in Syracuse, where he has taught for twenty years at Syracuse University.

Brian Turner is a soldier-poet who is the author of two poetry collections, Phantom Noise (2010) and Here, Bullet (2005) which won the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award, the New York Times “Editor’s Choice” selection, the 2006 Pen Center USA “Best in the
West” award, and the 2007 Poets Prize, among others. He also has a memoir, My Life as a Foreign Country (2014) that retraces his war experience. Turner served seven years in the US Army, to include one year as an infantry team leader in Iraq with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. Prior to that, he was deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1999-2000 with the 10th Mountain Division. Turner’s poetry has been published in Poetry Daily, The Georgia Review, and other journals, and in the Voices in Wartime Anthology published in conjunction with the feature-length documentary film of the same name. Turner was also featured in Operation Homecoming, a unique documentary that explores the firsthand accounts of American servicemen and women through their own words. He earned an MFA from the University of Oregon and has lived abroad in South Korea. In 2009, Turner was selected as one of fifty United States Artists Fellows.