Pulitzer Prize winner to open Latino Heritage Month events
IF YOU GOWhat: Junot Diaz lectureWhere: Joyce Hergenhan Auditorium, Newhouse III When: Today, 7 p.m.How much: Free
A Pulitzer Prize-winning novel was in its beginning stages in 1997 while its author, Junot Diaz, taught at Syracuse University.
Diaz will return to SU today to speak at the Latino Heritage Month commemorative lecture. He will speak in the Joyce Hergenhan Auditorium in Newhouse III at 7 p.m. about his book ‘The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,’ which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in April.
The Office of Multicultural Affairs, the student chapter of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the English Department will host the speech.
‘To a large extent, Diaz embodies the aspirations of U.S. Hispanic writers to enter the mainstream literary market without sacrificing the texture of their cultural difference,’ said Silvio Torres-Saillant, director of SU’s Latino-Latin Studies Program and an English professor.
Diaz, a Dominican-American, immigrated to the U.S. at the age of 6. He is the second Latino fiction author to win the Pulitzer Prize, Torres-Saillant said. The novel, which took 11 years to write and was released in September 2007, has been published in English and Spanish.
‘Having Diaz come as a Latino writer shows the diversity in the current media,’ said Celina Tousignant, president of the NAHJ student chapter. ‘He isn’t a newsroom journalist, but regardless, he is a Latino in communications.’
Diaz’s main character, Oscar Wao – a Spanish pronunciation of Oscar Wilde – is a 300-pound Dominican-American teenage nerd who is obsessed with science fiction and women. Oscar dreams of being the J.R.R. Tolkien of the Dominican Republic and of finding love, but an ancient Dominican curse, known as the ‘fuku,’ has plagued Oscar’s family for generations, and he is its next victim, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology News Web site.
Diaz’s first work, a short story collection titled ‘Drown,’ was released in 1997. His work has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review and Story, according to his Web site.
After leaving the SU English department, Diaz is now a professor of writing and humanistic studies at MIT and a fiction editor for the Boston Review. Diaz earned his undergraduate degree in history from Rutgers University and received his Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from Cornell University, according to the Making a Place for Latino/a Writers Web site.
‘I think that’s fabulous that he is Latino,’ Tousignant said. ‘However, his ethnicity is secondary to being an extraordinary writer. Those who do great things should be viewed for their accomplishments first and then their race.’
‘The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao’ also won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize and National Book Critics Circle best novel. The rights were sold to Miramax in May 2008 to turn the novel into a movie.
Published on September 23, 2008 at 12:00 pm
