Joyce Carol Oates Kicks Off Pen Center Usa Author Evening Series

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

JOYCE CAROL OATES KICKS OFF PEN CENTER USA AUTHOR EVENING SERIES

Los Angeles, CA – January 30, 2017 – PEN Center USA, a human rights and literary arts organization based in Los Angeles, is proud to announce its Author Evening Series. The series will celebrate the power of words to inform, entertain, inspire, and foster a vital literary culture. The first in the series is bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates on February 28, 2017 at the historical Hollywood Forever Masonic Lodge. The evening will include a brief reading by Joyce Carol Oates followed by a conversation between Oates and award-‐ winning poet Henri Cole.

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the nal Natio Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, The PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She has written some of the ction most enduring fi of our e, tim including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde (a finalist for the National k Boo 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, in 2006, she received the Chicago Tribune Lifetime Achievement Award.

Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan, in 1956. He has published nine collections of poetry including Middle Earth, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize ed in Poetry. He has receiv many awards for his work, including e, the Jackson Priz the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, a Guggenheim e Fellowship, th Lenore Marshall Award, and, most recently, a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard. His collection, ninth Nothing to Declare, was published by Farrar, Straus pring. and Giroux last s He teaches at Claremont McKenna College.

PEN Center USA’s mission is to stimulate nterest and maintain i in the written word, to foster a vital literary culture, and to defend freedom of expression domestically and internationally.

For more information on The Author Evening Series, please contact PEN Center USA at [email protected] or visit penusa.org.