Pultizer winner Junot Diaz at Rutgers-Newark Dec. 3
The 2008 winner of the Pultizer Prize in fiction, author Junot Díaz, will give a free public reading and talk at Rutgers University in Newark on Wednesday, Dec. 3, from 5:30 – 7 p.m. Poet Cathy Park Hong also will read and discuss her works during the program on Dec. 3. The event will be held in the Paul Robeson Gallery, Paul Robeson Campus Center, 350 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. For more information: 973/353-1107 or rnmfa@newark.rutgers.edu
The readings and talks are part of the Writers At Newark Reading Series, which brings nationally prominent writers of fiction, poetry and nonfiction to campus. The series allows students, faculty, staff and the public to hear and interact with these writers in an intimate and dynamic setting; all readings and discussions are free and open to the public. The series is jointly sponsored by the Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program at Rutgers University in Newark, The English Department, Paul Robeson Gallery and The Center for Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience.
Junot, a Rutgers alumnus, is the author of Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Literature. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, African Voices, Best American Short Stories (1996, 1997, 1999, 2000), and in Pushcart Prize XXII. He has received a Eugene McDermott Award, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, a Lila Acheson Wallace Readers Digest Award, the 2002 Pen/Malamud Award, the 2003 US-Japan Creative Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. He is the fiction editor at the Boston Review and an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Cathy Park Hong’s collection of poems, Dance Dance Revolution (2007), was chosen for the Barnard Women Poets Prize. Hong is also the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Village Voice Fellowship. She published her first book, Translating Mo’um, in 2002. Her poems are forthcoming or have been published in Paris Review, A Public Space, Poetry, American Letters & Commentary, Denver Quarterly, Verse, Jubilat, and other journals, and she has reported for the Village Voice, The Guardian, and Salon. She now lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.
For more information, please contact Carla Capizzi, 973/353-5262, or email: capizzi@rutgers.edu.
The Paul Robeson Campus Center is wheelchair-accessible, as is the Rutgers-Newark campus. Rutgers Newark can be reached by New Jersey Transit buses and trains, the PATH train and Amtrak from New York City, and by Newark Light Rail. Metered parking is available on University Avenue and at Rutgers Newark’s public parking garage, at 200 University Ave. Printable campus maps and driving directions are available online at: http://www.newark.rutgers.edu/maps/index.php
