Junot Díaz
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
“When I enter that higher-order space that’s required to write, I’m a better human. For whatever my writing is, wherever it’s ranked, it definitely is the one place that I get to be beautiful.” This is Junot Díaz, winner of a Eugene McDermott Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Lila Acheson Wallace Readers Digest Award, and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He came out of the gate early and emphatically with Drown, a collection of largely autobiographical short stories published to critical acclaim in 1996 when Diaz was twenty-eight. Eleven years later, his first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize.
His experience as a Dominican-American has informed his work as a fiction writer and immigrant advocate. He teaches creative writing at MIT.
Díaz will speak about the themes of immigration, displacement and alienation in his work.
Junot Díaz appears at the Taper Auditorium at Benaroya Hall at 7:30 PM on February 24.
Tickets:
Patron: $50 (Includes Patron reception with Junot Díaz and front-of-the-house seating), Main Floor: $30, Balcony: $25, Student/Under 25: $10
Groups of 5 or more receive a 15% discount.
To order tickets, visit lectures.org
