Junot Díaz was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Drown; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and This Is How You Lose Her, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist. He is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, PEN/Malamud Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and PEN/O. Henry Award. A graduate of Rutgers College, Díaz is currently the fiction editor at Boston Review and the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the cofounder of Voices of Our Nation Workshop.
Junot Díaz's awards with The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao:
2008 Pulitzer Prize
National Book Critics Circle Award
Date: February 19, 2025 (Wednesday)
Time: 7:00pm - 8:30pm
Venue: HKU Black Box, Room 54, LG/F, Centennial Campus, HKU (Location map)
Registration required. Very limited seats. No walk-in allowed. Priority given to HKU staff and students.
For HKU members (HKU Portal login is required): https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?ueid=98645
For non-HKU members: https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=98645
Social media is dominant and all over the globe the number of readers shrinks - in certain cases, precipitously. What is the role of writer and of reading in our social media age? What does the collapse of reading portend for our societies? What are readers and writers to do? Join Junot Díaz in conversation with Elizabeth Ho (Assistant Professor of English, Editor-in-Chief of ASAP/Journal).
Date: February 20, 2025 (Thursday)
Time: 10:00am - 12:00noon
Venue: HKU Black Box, Room 54, LG/F, Centennial Campus, HKU (Location map)
By Invitation only.
Worldbuilding — the creation of convincing “secondary" worlds — has become both an essential practice in storytelling across nearly all narrative medium and a defining feature of our global mass culture. Once a practice confined to genre nerds, worldbuilding is now everywhere in our culture — from the books we read to the games we play to the vast narrative “universes" controlled by the likes of Disney, Nintendo, and Warner Brothers. For better or worse, worldbuilding is how many of us come to understand our social / political worlds.
In our seminar we will discuss some of the strategies and principles common to the best secondary worlds in order to deepen our critical and creative understanding of this invaluable aesthetic practice.
More information about Junot Díaz from his official website here