Jean Hanff Korelitz joins the 2022 Poetry Festival as host for a live, sit-down conversation with guest poet Joyce Carol Oates at the Roseboro Hotel Ballroom in Sharon Springs, NY. Previously, Jean joined the 2019 Poetry Festival to interview guest poet and writer Erica Jong.
Jean Hanff Korelitz was born and raised in New York City and educated at Dartmouth College and Clare College, Cambridge. She is the best-selling author of nine novels: The Latecomer (forthcoming from Celadon Books on May 31, 2022), The Plot (adaptation forthcoming from Hulu, to star Mahershala Ali), You Should Have Known (Adapted for HBO as “The Undoing” by David E. Kelley, directed by Susanne Bier and starring Nicole Kidman, Hugh Grant, and Donald Sutherland), Admission (adapted as the 2013 film of the same name, starring Tina Fey, Lily Tomlin, and Paul Rudd), The Devil and Webster, The White Rose, The Sabbathday River and A Jury of Her Peers, as well as a middle-grade reader, Interference Powder, and a collection of poetry, The Properties of Breath. With her husband, Irish poet Paul Muldoon, she adapted James Joyce’s “The Dead” as an immersive theatrical event, THE DEAD, 1904. The play was produced by Dot Dot Productions, LLC, for the Irish Repertory Theatre and performed at New York’s American Irish Historical Society for seven-week runs in 2016, 2017, and 2018. Korelitz is the founder of BOOKTHEWRITER, a New York City-based service that offers “Pop-Up Book Groups” where readers can discuss books with their authors. Events are now being held simultaneously in person in New York City (with participants vaccinated and masked) and online over Zoom.
Novelist, poet, playwright and essayist Joyce Carol Oates is one of the most prolific American writers of the 20th century, the author of over 70 books, including the novels Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars. (2020); The Book of American Martyrs (2017); The Accursed (2013); The Gravedigger’s Daughter (2007); Blonde (2000), winner of the National Book Award; We Were the Mulvaneys (1996); Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (1990); You Must Remember This (1987); Bellefleur (1980); and them (1969), winner of the National Book Award. She is also the author of the story collections Beautiful Days (2018) and Dis mem ber (2017). Her short stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Harper’s, and have been widely anthologized. Oates has also published numerous books of poetry, including American Melancholy, (2021), Tenderness (1996), The Time Traveler (1989), Love and Its Derangements (1970), and Women In Love and Other Poems (1968). On her poetry, critic Doris Earnshaw said, “Oates’s poetry … forms a body of work on its own merits and does not need to be interpreted only as an adjunct to her novels and short stories. … Poetry’s compressed language releases its power more gradually, but intelligence and verbal brilliance combined with the ‘talk style’ rhythm that is not yet much understood should bring a wider audience to these poems.” Oates is the winner of the O. Henry Award, the National Humanities Medal, the Pivano Award, the Norman Mailer Prize for Lifetime Achievement, the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, the Rae Award for the Short Story, the Stone Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize. She has taught at the University of Detroit, the University of Windsor, and Princeton University, and has edited The Ontario Review. She is currently a visiting distinguished writer-in-residence in the graduate program at New York University. Her papers are held at Syracuse University Libraries.