JUST the sound of their names makes a literature lover go weak in the knees: Chang-rae Lee, Paul Muldoon, Toni Morrison, C.K. Williams... it’s one of the reasons Princeton is the intellectual capital of the universe.

   Princeton University’s creative writing professors are stars of the literary world. They are “quite simply, the best in the world,” according to the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mr. Muldoon, whose many roles include professor of creative writing, director of the Princeton Atelier, and chairman of both the Fund for Irish Studies and the Lewis Center for the Arts (and in his spare time, poetry editor of The New Yorker).

   The creative writing program, now a part of the Lewis Center, is celebrating its 70th anniversary with a reading series that will feature Joyce Carol Oates and Maxine Kumin Oct. 21. Later in the season, Russell Banks, Jeffrey Eugenides, Mr. Lee, W.S. Merwin, Mona Simpson, Robert Stone, Chase Twichell and Mr. Williams will give readings. All are current and emeritus faculty.

   Ms. Oates, who has been a faculty member since 1978, and Ms. Kumin, who taught at the university in 1978-1979, and then again in 1981-1982, have a relationship that goes back to 1972. When Ms. Kumin’s fourth book, Up Country: Poems of New England, was published, Ms. Oates reviewed it for The New York Times Book Review, “praising it highly,” recounts Ms. Kumin. “The following year it won the Pulitzer Prize. Although Joyce was not one of the group that made the decision, I always felt that her review garnered the book enough interest to bring it to the attention of the Pulitzer committee,” Ms. Kumin writes from her horse farm in Warner, N.H.

   Ms. Kumin and Ms. Oates also share a prodigious output. Ms. Kumin has published 16 books of poetry, four novels, a collection of short stories, more than 20 children’s books, four books of essays, an animal rights murder mystery and a memoir, Inside the Halo and Beyond: The Anatomy of a Recovery (W.W. Norton, 2000), about her near fatal horse-driving accident in 1999 that left her with a broken neck.

   In her 80s, Ms. Kumin starts her day promptly at 9 a.m., tending to the 200 acres she shares with her husband, Victor, and their two “very old” horses. The couple purchased the property in 1963 and have lived on it full time since 1976, taking in rescue dogs and having the experiences that appear in such volumes as Still to Mow, about New England rural life and her Jewish-American childhood in Philadelphia, and The Long Marriage, also about life on the New Hampshire farm.

   She has put 110 acres into conservation and describes the land as craggy granite “all up hill.”

   These days, she leads poetry workshops at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass., and at Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill, Mass. A new volume, Where I Live: New and Selected Poems 1990-2010, is due out in spring (W.W. Norton), and will include “far too many horse poems and selections from the last five books.” She also has a new children’s book, What Color is Caesar? (Candlewick Press), about a black-and-white dog with an identity crisis.

   ”Is he all black with white spots, or all white with black ones?” she asks.

   The Roots of Things: Essays (Northwestern University Press), also due in spring, is divided into three parts: the first section is about growing up, taking home economics in fifth grade, and being a student at Radcliffe in the 1940s; the second section is about other poets and her late editor at Norton, Carol Houck Smith; and the third is about “breeding horses, making soup and the garden,” Ms. Kumin says.

   Neither Ms. Kumin nor Ms. Oates had decided what they would be reading at press time, although Ms. Oates says she’ll most likely read a story that hasn’t yet been published.

   One of the most prolific writers ever, Ms. Oates has written more than 70 novels, short stories, criticism, essays, poetry and plays, and famously writes everything — including such bestsellers as Blonde (HarperCollins, 2001) and The Gravedigger’s Daughter (Ecco Press, 2007) — in long hand.

   Much of her work is set in rural upstate New York, where the National Book Award winner and 2007 Humanist of the Year grew up. (She was thrice-nominated for a Pulitzer and received the O. Henry Prize for continued achievement in the short story and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction.) Her newest novel, Little Bird of Heaven (Ecco, $25.99), about the grisly murder of a troubled country singer, is set in Sparta, N.Y.

   ”I visit upstate New York yearly, at least,” says Ms. Oates in an e-mail interview, with an October trip planned to Lockport and Niagara Falls.

   Sometimes Ms. Oates gets inspiration for her novels in the news, such as Black Water (1992), about a senator who plans to take a 26-year-old magazine writer to his hotel for a romantic rendezvous, but a car accident plunges them into a swampy marsh (loosely based on the Sen. Ted Kennedy incident at Chappaquiddick).

   Little Bird is not based on any specific incident, but “the larger theme — of injustice — the ‘cloud of suspicion’ that hangs over individuals whom the police have investigated for crimes for which they never arrest and charge them — is something that very much interests me,” she says. “Few reviewers — in fact, I don’t think any — have commented on this theme, so perhaps I will re-investigate it from a different perspective.”

   During the past two years, Ms. Oates has lost a good friend, John Updike, and her beloved husband of nearly half a century, Raymond Smith, with whom she ran Ontario Review Books. (She has since remarried.) How have these losses influenced her?

   ”My next volume of short stories — ‘Sourland: Tales of Loss, Grief and Forgetting’ is about various sorts of losses, primarily but not exclusively about a widow’s experience. I am working on a memoir — ‘The Siege: A Widow’s First Six Months’ — which is very personal and may not be publishable.”

   In addition to mourning the loss of friends and family, Ms. Oates mourns the loss of her characters when she has finished a novel. And yet some of her characters — like Gwen in Missing Mom (Ecco, 2005), who is based on her own mother, Carolina Oates — “reside with me still, and don’t really seem to have gone away.”

   Running has always been an important part of the writing process for Ms. Oates, who continues to run whenever she can to free the mind and nourish the imagination. “I really don’t enjoy walking at a normal pace,” she says. “It’s so very slow! Walking with other people, and talking, is very difficult for me.”

   She cautions: “We must take care in the creative writing program not to condition our young writers to expect any sort of immediate or even near-immediate media success. It can be very injurious to the spirit of writing, which must reside in quiet, privacy, even isolation from time to time.”

   Even for Ms. Oates, who has published so many volumes, “there are still hundreds, maybe thousands, of notes, sketches, near-complete short stories, awaiting the magical day when I can transform them into ‘type’ on the computer. But this day — these days — may never come.”

Joyce Carol Oates and Maxine Kumin will read from their work in celebration of the 70th anniversary of the creative writing program at Princeton University Oct. 21, 4:30 p.m., in the James M. Stewart Theater, 185 Nassau St., Princeton. A complete listing of the reading series is on the Lewis Center Web site: www.princeton.edu/arts