WESTFIELD–Pulitzer prize-winning author Junot Díaz will be at Westfield State University Tuesday, Oct. 11, to discuss immigration and the upcoming election.
Díaz, whose 2007 novel “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” won a 2008 Pulitzer for fiction and was recently called the “greatest novel of the 21st century to date” from a poll of US critics, will be presenting a lecture titled “Race and Immigration in Election Year 2016,” from 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. at Westfield State’s Scanlon Hall. The event is open and free to the public.
Photo of Junot Diaz, provided by Westfield State University.
The lecture is part of Westfield State University’s Hispanic/LatinX Heritage Month, a month-long celebration of Hispanic and Latino history and culture, through October 22, 2016, according to a Westfield State University press release.
Díaz was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, on Dec. 31, 1968. He lived with his mother and grandmother in the Dominican for the first several years of his life, while his father worked in the US. in 1974, he was reunited with his father when Díaz immigrated to Parlin, New Jersey.
Díaz received his Bachelor of Arts in English from Rutgers College in New Jersey in 1992, and in 1995 he obtained a Master of Fine Arts from Cornell University.
In addition to authoring an award-winning novel and two collections of short stories, Díaz currently teaches writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was awarded a MacArthur Genius grant in 2012. He is also the first member of Latin background to sit on the Pulitzer Prize board of jurors. He is also active in the Dominican community.
