Honoring Oates

GAMBIER, Ohio (October 21, 2003) Novelist Joyce Carol Oates will receive the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement on Tuesday, November 11, in New York City at the restaurant Daniel. The Kenyon Review, one of the nation's leading literary magazines, is honoring Oates as an author who crosses boundaries among genre and form, giving her readers a rich, memorable library of work and earning her a place among the most acclaimed authors of her generation.

The $5,000 cash award will be presented by E.L. Doctorow, recipient of the 2002 Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement and a 1952 graduate of Kenyon. The evening, sponsored by Bloomberg, the parent company of Bloomberg News, will include both live and silent auctions. Proceeds will benefit the Kenyon Review endowment fund.

The Kenyon Review Board of Trustees inaugurated the award in 2002 to recognize authors with superlative achievement across a career and a creative spirit surpassing mere fashion or brief commercial appeal.

More daring than is often noted, Joyce Carol Oates has embraced a variety of forms and genres, from the intense character realism of Them (for which she won the National Book Award in 1969), to such powerful Gothic sagas asBellefleur, to ambitious family chronicles and even suspense novels under the pseudonym of "Rosamond Smith." Oates's many other awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy Institute of Arts and Letters, and the O'Henry Prize for Continued Achievement in the Short Story.

The 2002 award ceremony for E.L. Doctorow raised more than $160,000 for the Review. The event was attended by such literary luminaries as Paris Review editor George Plimpton, essayist Roger Rosenblatt, and Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York City.

The Kenyon Review has been recognized for its influence on contemporary literature for more than sixty-five years. Founded by poet-critic John Crowe Ransom, the magazine has published some of the greatest writers of the twentieth century--from Katherine Anne Porter to Robert Penn Warren, from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Flannery O'Connor. Many were first introduced to the literary world by the Review, including Robert Lowell, Thomas Pynchon, and James Wright.

International in scope, the Review continues to publish award-winning, innovative work from emerging and established writers alike. In 2001, the magazine collaborated with Stockholm's Nobel Museum to produce a landmark issue celebrating the centenary of the Nobel Prizes. This fall, the Review's special "Culture and Place" issue landed in bookstores. This double Summer/Fall 2003 edition features more than three hundred pages of fiction, poetry, and essays by authors from across the globe. With the winter 2004 issue, the Review will return to quarterly publication after publishing three times a year since 1995.

One of the nation's leading liberal arts and sciences colleges and home to the Kenyon Review, Kenyon College offers 1,594 students a challenging educational experience enriched by a culture of friendship.