Students Share Work With Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author Junot Diaz
Students from Rider University’s Educational Opportunity Program (EOP) had a chance to share their work with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Diaz during the EOP Distinguished Writers Series event on Wednesday, November 19, on the Lawrenceville campus.
During the session, Diaz was present to hear the students’ critique of his work, answer questions and autograph books. Students were selected for writing the best papers in English composition classes taught during the summer by English adjunct instructors Fredrick Lasser and Jane Rosenbaum.
Presenting their papers were Amber Brown of East Orange, N.J., a freshman Communication major; Danielle Brown of East Orange, N.J., a freshman Journalism major; Angel Fisher of Riverside, N.J., a freshman Communication major; Lisa Henderson of Asbury Park, N.J., a freshman Communication major; Jose Leiva of Trenton, N.J., a freshman Accounting major; and Ashley Pichardo of Belleville, N.J., a freshman International Business major.
Jarea Bivens of Newark, N.J., a freshman General Liberal Arts major, also read a poem that he had published in Rider’s new literary journal On Fire!!
Diaz won a Pulitzer Prize for his tale, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which tells the story of Oscar, a Dominican teenager with a broken heart who focuses his interests toward sci-fi novels and Star Trek, while growing up in New Jersey. Similarly, Diaz was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and moved to New Jersey at a young age. The author shared excerpts during a public reading Wednesday night on campus.
Diaz also wrote the novel Drown. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, African Voices, Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize XXII and in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2009. Diaz received his undergraduate degree from Rutgers University and his M.F.A. from Cornell University. Currently, Diaz is the fiction editor at the Boston Review and a professor in the Writing and Humanistic Studies program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
This year’s marked the EOP Distinguished Writers Series’ eighth year. Past guests have included Ernest Gaines, a Pulitzer Prize nominee; Derek Walcott, 1992 Nobel Prize winner in literature; Edwidge Danticat, an American Book winner; and Amiri Baraka, former state poet laureate.
