Joyce Carol Oates Hosts the WordTheatre Pushcart Benefit at Guild Hall

Storied author Joyce Carol Oates will host the WordTheatre Pushcart Benefit at Guild Hall at 8 p.m. tonight, Thursday, August 15.

The event, entitled Telling Tales: Stories of People Being Mostly Bad to Each Other (and a Little Good) is WordTheatre’s fifth bienniel program in celebration of The Pushcart Prize, an annual publication which honors the best “poetry, short fiction, essays or literary whatnot” published in the small presses over the previous year. A “remarkable cast of actors” will bring these brilliant short stories to life. Three of the cast own homes on the East End, while others are traveling from Manhattan, and as from as far as Los Angeles, to lend their talents to the prize. VIP tickets include a post performance reception with the actors.

Performers include Chris Bauer of True Blood and Flags of Our Fathers, Tracee Chimo from Netflix hit Orange is the New Black, Gary Dourdan from CSI, Polly Draper (Side Effects, thirtysomething), Ronald Guttman (Mad Men, upcoming Nina), Charlie Moss (Smash, Person of Interest), Alex Wolff (The Sitter, The Naked Brothers Band) and Harris Yulin of The Place Beyond the Pines and Training Day.

Host Joyce Carol Oates, a Founding Editor of The Pushcart Prize, Pulitzer Prize nominee and winner of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in short fiction, is reading one of her award-winning stories. She is a New York Times bestselling author and regularly featured in such publications as The New Yorker and Harper’s Magazine, among many others. She is also a professor at Princeton University.

Proceeds from this event support The Pushcart Prize Fellowships, “one of the most important publishing projects in American history,” according to Publishers Weekly, as well as WordTheatre in Schools, which brings actors, authors and great contemporary literature to under-served students. The 2013 Pushcart will be available for sale on site.

Admission is $25-$45, or $100 with VIP reception. Tickets are available through Guild Hall, 866-811-4111 or guildhall.org.