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Author Details

Author Details

Mosley, Walter

"Walter Mosley is the author of twelve books and has been translated into twenty-one languages. His popular mysteries featuring Easy Rawlins and his friend Raymond ""Mouse"" Alexander began with Devil in a Blue Dress. It was published by W.W. Norton in 1990, and was nominated for an Edgar. The TriStar film, ""Devil in a Blue Dress,"" produced by Jonathan Demme, directed by Carl Franklin, and starring Denzel Washington and Jennifer Beals was released in the fall of 1995 and garnered critical acclaim and many awards. Others in the series, A Red Death and White Butterfly were also nominated for several awards. Black Betty and A Little Yellow Dog were New York Times bestsellers.

The independent Black Classic Press located in Baltimore, Maryland published the prequel to the Rawlins' series in January 1997. Mosley decided to give a novel to a small black publishing house, because he felt it was important ""to create a model that other writers, black or not, can look at to see that it's possible to publish a book successfully outside mainstream publishing in New York."" Gone Fishin' was published in paperback by Pocket in January 1998. Audio rights went to Dove Audio and the first serial was sold to Essence.

W.W. Norton published Mosley's blues novel, RL's Dream in 1995 to critical acclaim. It was a finalist for the NAACP Award in Fiction and won the 1996 Black Caucus of the American Library Association's Literary Award. Washington Square Press published the book in paperback. In the fall of 1997, Mosley introduced a new character, ex-con Socrates Fortlow, whose move to contemporary Los Angeles infuses the episodic tales with ethical and political considerations. W.W. Norton published Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned: The Socrates Fortlow Stories, excerpts from which have been published in Esquire, GQ, USA Weekend, Buzz, and Mary Higgins Clark Mystery Magazine. One of these new stories was an O'Henry Award winner for 1996 and is featured in Prize Stories 1996: The O'Henry Awards edited by William Abraham. The collection of stories was made into an HBO/NYC and Palomar Pictures film, starring Laurence Fishburne, Natalie Cole, Cicely Tyson and Bill Cobbs. The feature, directed by Michael Apted (""Gorillas in the Mist"") had a screenplay written by Mosley and premiered on HBO on March 21, 1998. The book was also awarded the Anisfield Wolf Award, an honor given to works that increase the appreciation and understanding of race in America.

Little Brown & Company published the next installment in the life of Socrates Fortlow, Walkin' The Dog in the fall of 1999. HBO once again commissioned a Mosley screenplay to be based on this new collection. Little Brown & Company also published Mosley's first science fiction novel, Blue Light in November 1998. The book was on The Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle bestseller lists and won accolades for its daring invention and vision. He was also awarded the TransAfrica International Literary Prize this same season for all of his work. In the winter of 2000, Mosley joined the list of luminaries writing for The Library of Contemporary Thought, published by Ballantine Books. His work, ""Workin' on the Chain Gang"" used the perspective of race history to examine the American economic and political machine. This year, The New York Times included Mosley's contribution to the newspaper's series, ""Writers on Writing,"" in their book publication of those columns.

In 1996 Mosley was named the first Artist-in-Residence, at the Africana Studies Institute, New York University. Since that residency, he has continued to work with the department, creating an innovative lecture series entitled ""Black Genius"" which brings diverse speakers from art, politics and academe to discuss practical solutions to contemporary issues. Designed as a ""public classroom"" these lectures have included speakers ranging from Spike Lee to Angela Davis. In February 1999, W.W. Norton published the collection as Black Genius, with a Mosley introduction and essay.

His short fiction has been published in a wide array of publications including The New Yorker, GQ, Esquire, USA Weekend, Los Angeles Times Magazine and Savoy. For the latter, Mosley is publishing a story a month for the magazine's 2001 launch year. The series is called ""The Tempest Tales"" in homage to Langston Hughes' ""Simple Stories."" The American Society of Magazine Editors has honored a story he published in GQ, ""The Black Woman in the Chinese Hat,"" in 2000; GQ is a finalist in the fiction category for the award.

In 2001 Mosley returned to the mystery world with the debut of the 'Fearless Jones' series, set in 1950's Los Angeles and introducing second-hand bookstore owner Paris Minton and his best friend, war veteran Fearless Jones, the novel is already garnering early praise.

Mosley created with the City University of New York (CUNY) a new publishing certificate program aimed at young urban residents. It is the only such program in the country. Mosley also serves on the board of directors of the National Book Awards, The Poetry Society of America, and is past-president of the Mystery Writers of America. He lives in New York City."

McBain, Ed

"Ed McBain was the first American to receive the Diamond Dagger, the British Crime Writers Association's highest award. He also holds the Mystery Writers of America's coveted Grand Master Award, and received an Edgar Award nomination for his novel Money, Money, Money. His books have sold more than one hundred million copies, ranging from the more than fifty titles in his outstanding 87th Precinct series to the bestselling novels The Blackboard Jungle and Criminal Conversation, written under his own name, Evan Hunter. Writing as both Ed McBain and Evan Hunter, he broke new ground with Candyland, a novel in two parts. His most recent Evan Hunter novel, The Moment She Was Gone, was published by Simon & Schuster in July 2002. He is also the author of the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. He lives in Connecticut with his wife, Dragica. "

Oates, Joyce Carol

"Joyce Carol Oates has often expressed an intense nostalgia for the time and place of her childhood, and her working-class upbringing is lovingly recalled in much of her fiction. Yet she has also admitted that the rural, rough-and-tumble surroundings of her early years involved ""a daily scramble for existence."" Growing up in the countryside outside of Lockport, New York, she attended a one-room schoolhouse in the elementary grades. As a small child, she told stories instinctively by way of drawing and painting before learning how to write. After receiving the gift of a typewriter at age fourteen, she began consciously training herself, ""writing novel after novel"" throughout high school and college.

Success came early: while attending Syracuse University on scholarship, she won the coveted Mademoiselle fiction contest. After graduating as valedictorian, she earned an M.A. in English at the University of Wisconsin, where she met and married Raymond J. Smith after a three-month courtship; in 1962, the couple settled in Detroit, a city whose erupting social tensions suggested to Oates a microcosm of the violent American reality. Her finest early novel, them, along with a steady stream of other novels and short stories, grew out of her Detroit experience. ""Detroit, my 'great' subject,"" she has written, ""made me the person I am, consequently the writer I am?for better of worse.""

Between 1968 and 1978, Oates taught at the University of Windsor in Canada, just across the Detroit river. During this immensely productive decade, she published new books at the rate of two or three per year, all the while maintaining a full-time academic career. Though still in her thirties, Oates had become one of the most respected and honored writers in the United States. Asked repeatedly how she managed to produce so much excellent work in a wide variety of genres, she gave variations of the same basic answer, telling the New York Times in 1975 that ""I have always lived a very conventional life of moderation, absolutely regular hours, nothing exotic, no need, even, to organize my time."" When a reporter labeled her a ""workaholic,"" she replied, ""I am not conscious of working especially hard, or of 'working' at all. Writing and teaching have always been, for me, so richly rewarding that I don't think of them as work in the usual sense of the word.""

In 1978, Oates moved to Princeton, New Jersey, where she continues to teach in Princeton University's creative writing program; she and her husband also operate a small press and publish a literary magazine, The Ontario Review. Shortly after arriving in Princeton, Oates began writing Bellefleur, the first in a series of ambitious Gothic novels that simultaneously reworked established literary genres and reimagined large swaths of American history. Published in the early 1980s, these novels marked a departure from the psychological realism of her earlier work. But Oates returned powerfully to the realistic mode with ambitious family chronicles (You Must Remember This, Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart), novels of female experience (Solstice, Marya : A Life), and even a series of pseudonymous suspense novels (published under the name ""Rosamond Smith"") that again represented a playful experiment with literary genre. As novelist John Barth once remarked, ""Joyce Carol Oates writes all over the aesthetical map.""

The dramatic trajectory of Oates's career, especially her amazing rise from an economically straitened childhood to her current position as one of the world's most eminent authors, suggests a feminist, literary version of the mythic pursuit and achievement of the American dream. Yet for all her success and fame, Oates's daily routine of teaching and writing has changed very little, and her commitment to literature as a transcendent human activity remains steadfast. Not surprisingly, a quotation from that other prolific American writer, Henry James, is affixed to the bulletin board over her desk, and perhaps best expresses her own ultimate view of her life and writing: ""We work in the dark?we do what we can?we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."""