Stu Levitan welcomes to Madison BookBeat one of our greatest living writers, perhaps the preeminent American writer, Joyce Carol Oates. She holds a master’s degree and an honorary doctorate from the University of Wisconsin, but of greater immediate interest is that she’s coming back to Madison for an appearance at the Wisconsin Book Festival this Thursday evening the 28^th to talk about her new collection, Zero-Sum. That’s at 7 o’clock in the Madison Central Library.

To call Joyce Carol Oates prolific is something of an understatement; her statistics are staggering. By one account, 62 novels, 47 short-story collections, 16 collections of nonfiction, 9 collections of poetry, plays and books for children and young adults. And the quality of her work is just as impressive as the quantity -- she received the National Book Award for Fiction in 1970 for the novel them, Barack Obama awarded her the National Humanities Medal in 2010, and she’s been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize six times over a 45-year period. And those are just the highlights. She also maintains a very active presence on the social media site formerly known as Twitter. It is a great pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat Joyce Carol Oates