Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Junot D az to visit Skidmore

Award-winning writer Junot D az is widely honored for his visceral, fresh, and street-smart prose style and for his ability to span the two different worlds inhabited by many of his characters: the U.S. and the Dominican Republic. D az will read from his critically acclaimed 2007 debut novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, beginning at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 12, in Gannett Auditorium, Palamountain Hall, at Skidmore.

The event, which is free and open to the public, is the keynote presentation for the College?s observance of Latino Heritage Month. D az?s reading will be simulcast in nearby Davis Auditorium. A book signing and reception will follow the reading.

Oscar Wao, which the New York Times called ?an extraordinarily vibrant book fueled by adrenaline-powered prose,? won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for fiction as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award, the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

D az?s short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, African Voices, Best American Short Stories (1996, 1997, 1999, 2000), Pushcart Prize XXII, and The O?Henry Prize Stories 2009. Drown, his well-received book of short stories published in 1996, was described by New York magazine as ?by most accounts the first great work of Dominican-American fiction.? The collection earned its author a 1999 Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Fund Writers Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

After the publication of Drown, it took D az 11 years to write Oscar Wao. The idea for the novel came, he told Newsweek magazine, when ?one of my Mexican friends had picked up a copy of The Importance of Being Earnest off his bookshelf and he started talking about how important Oscar Wilde was in his life. In Spanish it?s hard to pronounce ?Wilde? without it coming out sounding like ?Wao.? And I just loved that,? said D az. ?I had this incredible vision of this whole family: this fat kid, can't get laid, loves his super-athletic, burning-with-rage-towards-her-mother-but-incredibly-forward-looking sister, and then this really [messed]-up mom. They just jumped into my head.?

The years spent wrestling with writer?s block were ?an incredibly difficult struggle,? said D az. ?Every day you just want to give up. But you don?t find out you?re an artist because you do something really well. You find out you?re an artist because when you fail you have something within you?strength or belief or just craziness?that picks you back up again.?

Born in Santo Domingo, D az emigrated to the U.S. with his family when he was six, during the ?Dominican diaspora? that followed the death of dictator Rafael Trujillo in 1961. D az attended Rutgers University, where he was influenced by the work of Pulitzer- and Nobel Prize-winning writer Toni Morrison; he now teaches creative writing in MIT?s Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and is the fiction editor at the Boston Review.

When asked about being labeled a Latino writer, D az has said, ?I think the entire universe can be found in the Dominican experience. If you want the ground zero where the Old World died and the New World began, it?s there. I mean, nothing is more quintessentially American?the extermination of indigenous people, the conquest of the New World, slavery and in some ways the rise of this form of capitalism that we all live under? the modern world was given rise by what began in the Caribbean.? ~By Barbara Melville