Ideas in Dialogue 2016
Mind the Gap: Crossing Imaginary Lines
April 28, 7:00-8:30 p.m.
Bram & Bluma Appel Salon
Toronto Reference Library, 789 Yonge St.
Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, This is How You Lose Her) will be interviewed by Sunil Yapa (Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist) about diaspora, globalization, and those we reach towards–economically, geographically, personally–when we write, and also about the ways in which reading can be a radical act of empathy.
ALL TICKETS FOR THIS EVENT HAVE BEEN CLAIMED. RUSH SEATING WILL BE AVAILABLE. CLICK HERE TO ADD YOUR NAME TO THE WAITING LIST.
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.
Sunil Yapa holds a bachelor’s degree in economic geography from Penn State University and an MFA from Hunter College. The biracial son of a Sri Lankan father and mother from Montana, Yapa has lived around the world, including time in Greece, Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, China, and India, as well as London, Montreal, and New York City.