Junot D������az, one of Newsweek's "New Faces of 1996" and winner of the Council for the Arts at MIT's 1998 Eugene McDermott Award, will read from his works on Wednesday, March 10 at 7pm in Rm 6-120. The author is artist-in-residence at MIT from March 9-11, where he's working with students in writing and humanities courses. For more information, call the Office of the Arts at x3-8089.
Born and raised in Santo Domingo, Mr. D������az writes of the revelations of childhood in the Dominican Republic and the realities of adulthood in urban New Jersey. His story collection, Drown (1996), was called "stunning... a front-line report on the ambivalent promise of the American dream" (San Francisco Chronicle), while Newsweek wrote, "Talent this big will always make noise... D������az has the dispassionate eye of a journalist and the tongue of a poet."
Mr. D������az's stories have appeared in numerous other publications, including Story, the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Best American Fiction '96 and Best American Fiction '97. He was recently awarded a 1999 Guggenheim Fellowship and his story, "The Sun, The Moon, The Stars" was selected for the upcoming Best American Fiction '99 (October 1999). He is currently at work on a novel forthcoming from Riverhead and Vintage Espa�ol.
A version of this article appeared in the March 10, 1999 issue of MIT Tech Talk (Volume 43, Number 22).
