Hispanic heritage A Reading by Junot Diaz" 2009

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Immediate: March 10, 2009 Contact: Alicia Steger 516.572.9634 e-mail: alicia.steger@ncc.edu

The Nassau Community College Hispanic Heritage Month Committee Presents "Notes from the New America: A Reading by Junot Diaz"

Garden City, NY The Nassau Community College Hispanic Heritage Month Committee invites the community to attend Notes from the New America: A Reading by Junot Diaz. The event will take place on Monday, March 30 at 6:25 p.m. in the College Center Building.

Junot Diaz was born in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. Throughout most of his early childhood, his father worked in the United States. Diaz immigrated in 1974 and went to live in New Jersey, where he attended school, eventually graduating from Rutgers College in 1992. He then earned an MFA from Cornell University. Currently, Diaz teaches creative writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and is the fiction editor of the Boston Review. He is also a founding member of the Voices of Our Nations Arts Writing Workshop, a writing workshop focused on writers of color.

Diaz's short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, which listed him as one of the top 20 writers for the 21st century. He has also been published in The Paris Review, Story and several anthologies. He's perhaps best known for the short story collection Drown and the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize.

Among Diaz's awards are a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, a Lila Acheson Wallace Readers Digest Award and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Junot Diaz's appearance at NCC is co-sponsored by the Student Organization of Latinos. For more information about the program, which is free and open to the public, call 516.572.7148. Please note that seating is limited for this event.

 

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