Reading + Book Signing with Junot Díaz
Thursday, April 12, 2018
6:00 pm doors open
7:00 pm reading and book signing program
2nd Floor Reading Room, Main Library
5 Washington Street, Newark
Join us for a free family reading event! Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Díaz will be reading and signing his new children’s book Islandborn (Lola in español), with illustrations by Leo Espinosa.
Every kid in Lola’s school was from somewhere else.
Hers was a school of faraway places.
Hear how Lola drew on the memories of her family to draw a picture of the island where she was born.
Please Note: Seating for this special event is limited to 300 persons. Please click on this link to go to the online registration form. Please note: preregistration does not guarantee seating.
Any child attending this program will receive a free book in English or Spanish, while supplies last. Additional copies of the book will be available for $12.
Dominican American author, educator, and editor Junot Díaz was born in the Dominican Republic and emigrated with his family to New Jersey when he was six years old. A graduate of Rutgers University, he is the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and serves as fiction editor at the journal Boston Review.
Díaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has published two short story collections, Drown and This Is How You Lose Her, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2012. He has received a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” fellowship, the PEN/Malamud Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and the PEN/O. Henry Award. He was inducted as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2017, and became the first Latinx juror for the Pulitzer Prize board in 2010.
This program is cosponsored by the Newark Public Library, the Friends of the HRIC, and Newark Mommies.
For more information, please call 973-733-7772.
Free books for children are provided through First Book, thanks to funding from the Victoria Foundation.
Free parking will be available at the Essex County Parking Deck on Bridge Street, between McCarter Highway (NJ Route 21) and Broad Street, from 3:00 – 10:30 pm. All cars must exit the lot no later than 10:30 pm. Many thanks to Essex County Executive Joseph DiVincenzo and the Essex County Improvement Authority for making free parking available.
