Jaquira Díaz will be on campus next week to read from her new memoir coming out at the end of the month, Ordinary Girls. The event is free and open to the public. Below please find more information about the book and author.
About Ordinary Girls
?Ordinary Girls is a fierce, beautiful, and unflinching memoir from a wildly talented debut author. While growing up in housing projects in Puerto Rico and Miami Beach, Jaquira Díaz found herself caught between extremes: as her family split apart and her mother battled schizophrenia, she was surrounded by the love of her friends; as she longed for a family and home, she found instead a life upended by violence. From her own struggles with depression and sexual assault to Puerto Rico’s history of colonialism, every page of Ordinary Girls vibrates with music and lyricism. Díaz triumphantly maps a way out of despair toward love and hope to become her version of the girl she always wanted to be.
Reminiscent of Tara Westover’s Educated, Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, and Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries, Jaquira Díaz’s memoir provides a vivid portrait of a life lived in (and beyond) the borders of Puerto Rico and its complicated history—and reads as electrically as a novel.
About Jaquira Díaz
Jaquira Díaz is the author of Ordinary Girls, a memoir, and I Am Deliberate, a novel, both forthcoming from Algonquin Books. She is a 2016-18 Kenyon Review Fellow, and recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, two MacDowell Colony Fellowships, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, a Florida Individual Artist Fellowship, the Carl Djerassi Fiction Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, and an NEA Fellowship to the Hambidge Center for the Arts. A finalist for The Krause Essay Prize, she's been awarded fellowships or scholarships from the Sewanee Writers' Conference, Summer Literary Seminars, the Tin House Summer Writers' Workshop, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Her work appears in The Best American Essays 2016, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, The FADER, Kenyon Review, The Sun, Salon, Brevity, Tin House online, Gulf Coast, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Longreads, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and nytimes.com, among other publications. A Writer in Residence at the Summer Literary Seminars in Tbilisi and Kenya, she is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's MFA Program in Creative Writing, and Consulting Editor at the Kenyon Review.
