Author Joyce Carol Oates, Artist Jane Creech Combine Talents at Converse

One of America’s most distinguished authors will combine talents with Converse alumna for a reading, book signing and art exhibition in Twichell Auditorium on Friday, April 27. National Book Award winner and Elizabeth Boatwright Coker Visiting Writer, Joyce Carol Oates will give a reading at 3 pm, followed by a reception featuring artwork by alumna JaneYarborough Creech ’60, whose portrait of Oates was selected for the cover of Oates’ book, A Widow’s Story. Limited edition prints of Creech’s portrait from A Widow’s Story, as well as books, will be sold for signing by both the artist and the author. The event is free and open to the public.

“Having a writer of Joyce Carol Oates‘ caliber on campus provides an inspirational experience that might well be the catalyst to help launch a student’s writing career.”

“Converse and the creative writing program regularly bring renowned writers to campus to meet with our students and the community,” said Rick Mulkey, director of the college’s creative writing program. “Having a writer of Joyce Carol Oates’ caliber on campus provides an inspirational experience that might well be the catalyst to help launch a student’s writing career.”

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers, We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde (a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize), and the New York Times bestsellers The Falls (winner of the 2005 Prix Femina Etranger) and The Gravedigger’s Daughter. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

In 2003, she received the Common Wealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature and The Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, and in 2006, she received the Chicago Tribune Lifetime Achievement Award. Classically trained early in her career in painting and drawing under the tutelage of renowned painter August Cook, Jane Creech later turned to fine-art photography. Her works often are mix mediums where she combines painting elements into the photographs. She has traveled the country making photographs of some of the greatest Twentieth Century American writers, including Pulitzer Prize-winning author Eudora Welty, National Book Award-winning author Walker Percy, and Joyce Carol Oates. She also photographs nature, using Fripp Island and her hometown of Greenville, S.C. as her living laboratory.