Statewide Reading Initiative

Award winning author Junot Díaz To Visit with Tennessee Teens. Register to attend today!

As part of our community outreach programs and reading initiatives, Humanities Tennessee is proud to host A Morning with Junot Díaz. The award-winning author will be discussing and reading from his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, followed by a question and answer segment, dialog with participants, and book signing.

A Morning with Junot Díaz is a free event and will take place on Thursday, April 8 at 10:30 a.m. in Memphis, and on Friday, April 9 at 10:00a.m. in Clarksville. Each student participating in the event will receive a free copy of Junot Díaz's novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, provided by Humanities Tennessee, and will have the opportunity to have their book signed by Mr. Díaz at the event.

Junot Díaz was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic and is the author of Drown, a collection of short stories and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao which won the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, African Voices, Best American Short Stories (1996, 1997, 1999, 2000), in Pushcart Prize XXII, and in The O'Henry Prize Stories 2009.

Díaz 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 and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the fiction editor at the Boston Review and is currently Nancy Allen professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

This event is geared towards junior and senior high school students in literature classes, Spanish classes, history classes and more. Please be aware that mature themes and language exist in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. We ask that students attending as a class be given the choice to opt out of this event should they, or their parents, so choose.

Space for this event is limited and will be granted on a first come basis. If you are interested in participating, for more information, and to register to attend, please contact Lacey Cook via e-mail: Lacey@HumanitiesTennessee.org or by phone: 615.770.0006 x19.

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