Pulitzer-Prize Winning Writer and MacArthur Fellow Junot Díaz To Give Reading at Bard College

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.—On Monday, April 1, Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize–winning fiction writer and recipient of a 2012 MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, will read from his work at Bard College. The New York Times called Díaz “one of contemporary fiction’s most distinctive and irresistible new voices.” Díaz is the author of the critically acclaimed short story collection Drown (1997); the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008), which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and the recent collection of stories This Is How You Lose Her (2012), a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist. The reading will be introduced by novelist and Bard literature professor Bradford Morrow and will be followed by a Q&A session and book signing. This event, presented as part of Morrow’s Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series in partnership with the Center for Civic Engagement and the Media and Difference Project, takes place on Monday, April 1, at 6 p.m. in Olin Auditorium. It is free and open to the public; no reservations are required.
 
Of Díaz’s fiction, the New York Times Book Review writes, “Like Raymond Carver, Díaz transfigures disorder and disorientation with a rigorous sense of form . . . [He] wrings the heart with finely calibrated restraint.” Newsweek asserts, “Talent this big will always make noise . . . Díaz has the dispassionate eye of a journalist . . . and the tongue of a poet.” His most recent book, the short story collection This Is How You Lose Her, turns an eye to love. Library Journal writes, “Díaz’s third book is as stunning as its predecessors. These stories are hard and sad, but in Díaz’s hands they also crackle.” Kirkus Reviews calls it, “Magnificent . . . an exuberant rendering of the driving rhythms and juicy Spanglish vocabulary of immigrant speech . . . sharply observed and morally challenging.”
 
Junot Díaz was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. In addition to the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, he is the recipient of a PEN/Malamud Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and PEN/O. Henry Award. A graduate of Rutgers College, Díaz is currently the fiction editor at Boston Review and the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the cofounder of Voices of Our Nation Workshop.
 
This reading is presented with generous support from Bard College’s Languages and Literature Division, International Students Organization, Latin American and Iberian Studies Program, Latin American Student Organization, Spanish Studies Program, and Human Rights Program.
 
For more information about this event or to be placed on the Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series e-mail list, contact [email protected] or call 845-758-7054.

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CAPTION INFO: On Monday, April 1, Pulitzer Prize–winning fiction writer and recipient of a 2012 MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship Junot Díaz will read from his work at Bard College.
PHOTO CREDIT: Nina Subin
TO DOWNLOAD A HIGH-RESOLUTION PHOTO, go to: www.bard.edu/news/pressphotos/

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This event was last updated on 03-18-2013

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