“A Conversation with Jaquira Díaz,” moderated by Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English Lorraine M. López, will take place via Zoom online conferencing software on Thursday, April 16. The event with Díaz, which is hosted by the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, is scheduled from 2 to 3 p.m.
Please email Mary Lindstrom at mary.g.lindstrom@vanderbilt.edu for the Zoom link and password.
Díaz is the author of Ordinary Girls: A Memoir, which recounts her life growing up in poverty as a gay Afro-Latina during Miami Beach’s economic blight, and in Puerto Rico’s over-policed government housing projects. Her book has received numerous awards, including the Whiting Award in Nonfiction and a Florida Book Awards Gold Medal. She was also a finalist in the 2020 Lambda Literary Awards.
A former visiting assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s MFA Program in Creative Writing and consulting editor at The Kenyon Review, Díaz splits her time between Montréal and Miami Beach with her partner, the writer Lars Horn. Her second book, I Am Deliberate: A Novel, is forthcoming from Algonquin Books.
Díaz had been scheduled to read from her memoir and discuss its writing for the annual Harry C. Howard Lecture, which was canceled this spring due to the coronavirus outbreak.