Oates moved to Detroit in 1962, where she began teaching at the University of Detroit. Influenced by the Vietnam war, the 1967 Detroit race riots,, in 1968 Oates moved with her late husband, Raymond J. Smith, to teaching positions at the University of Windsor, Canada and remained at Windsor until  1978 when they both moved to Princeton. During her years at Windsor, she and Raymond founded The Ontario Review in 1974 and, later, Ontario Review Books on both of which she served as Associate Editor.  As Smith noted on The Ontario Review web site,”Conceived of as a North American Journal of the Arts, it was intended to bridge what Joyce and I, Americans teaching in Canada at the time, felt to be a widening gap between the two literary/artistic cultures. We tried to do this by publishing writers and artists from both countries, as well as essays and reviews of an intercultural nature. When we moved to Princeton, we put less emphasis on the intercultural role of the journal, though we still published many Canadians, from Margaret Atwood to Tom Wayman. . . .Over the past two and a half decades we have featured over 450 different poets, writers, translators, reviewers, artists, and photographers. Among them are Alice Adams, Jane Anderson, Margaret Atwood, Russell Banks, Donald Barthelme, Saul Bellow, Pinckney Benedict, Earle Birney, Joseph Brodsky, Hayden Carruth, Raymond Carver, Annie Dillard, Rita Dove, Margaret Drabble, Stuart Dybek, Carlos Fuentes, Tess Gallagher, Albert Goldbarth, Nadine Gordimer, Eaman Grennan, Donald Hall, William Heyen, Ted Hughes, Josephine Jacobsen, Jill Krementz, Maxine Kumin, Irving Layton, Doris Lessing, Alistair MacLeod, W. S. Merwin, Mary Morris, Barry Moser, Gloria Naylor, Joyce Carol Oates, Alicia Ostriker, Jay Parini, Stanley Plumly, Reynolds Price, Ned Rorem, Philip Roth, Dave Smith, Gary Soto, Elizabeth Spencer, William Stafford, Mark Strand, Deborah Tannen, Melanie Rae Thon, Chase Twichell, John Updike, David Wagoner, Robert Penn Warren, Tom Wayman, Theodore Weiss, C. K. Williams, and Charles Wright.  For people like me, The Ontario Review was the little magazine we all wanted to be published in during the seventies and eighties.  None of my short stories made it into its pages but I picked up a couple of classy rejection slips.