Joyce Carol Oates and Salman Rushdie Visit   Oates and Rushdie Eminent novelist, essayist, short story writer, poet, playwright, and educator Joyce Carol Oates was the first guest in this year's Department of Writing Distinguished Visiting Writers Series. Oates's first novel, With Shuddering Fall, received the National Book Award; she's gone on to publish 37 novels and novellas, 23 volumes of short stories, 7 volumes of poetry, 4 volumes of plays, and many short stories, as well as nonfiction works on subjects ranging from the poetry of Emily Dickinson to studies of the gothic genre to boxer Mike Tyson. On campus she held a public reading of her work and met with writing majors and faculty. The School of Humanities and Sciences brought controversial author Salman Rushdie to campus as the distinguished speaker of the semester. The free lecture on his recent nonfiction collection, Step across This Line, concluded with a question-and-answer session and book signing. Nearly 200 people waited in line to get the author's signature and have a word with the man who skyrocketed to international fame when he was placed under a fatwa by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini. "It was a long struggle," he says of that time. "But the international community and President Clinton applied pressure to end the fatwa. I continued to live my life and write my books." Photos: Joyce Carol Oates: John Clisham Salman Rushdie: Shai Evans

A. Ozolins, Ithaca College Office of Publications, 11 March, 2004