Who is Joyce Carol Oates?

  Joyce Carol Oates  is an American author. She was born in Lockport, New York in 1938 and grew up in the working-class farming community in the family of tool and die designer and a housewife.Her favourite writers were Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Ernest Hemingway.
 Oates published her first book in 1963 and has since published over 40 novels, as well as a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award. The most famous  novels  are: "Black Water "(1992), "What I Lived For" (1994), "Blonde" (2000), and short story collections "The Wheel of Love and Other Stories" (1970) and "Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories" (2014). She created
    "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" is a frequently anthologized short story written by Joyce Carol Oates. The story first appeared in the Fall 1966 edition of Epoch Magazine. It was inspired by four Tucson, Arizona murders committed by Charles Schmid, which were profiled in Life magazine in an article written by Don Moser on March 4, 1966.
    I think that her words characterise her style the best: “My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.”