Junot Díaz to Visit the White House

January 10, 2017

Junot Díaz Junot Díaz fans will have to miss out on seeing the author in Los Angeles this week due to an unexpected invitation from The White House, the Los Angeles Times reports.

The Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT), which had planned to host the reading on January 13, released a statement last week that the event will be postponed until February 17 since “Mr. Díaz received an unexpected invitation from the White House to attend a private event during the last week of the current administration.”

Díaz, who authored This Is How You Lose Her, Drown, and the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, has been awarded a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship and the 2016 Literature Award of the Hispanic Heritage Awards established by the White House in 1987.

Díaz joins Michael Chabon, Billy Collins, Rita Dove, Kenneth Goldsmith, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Marilynne Robinson, Mayda del Valle, and Ayelet Waldman as a visitor to the White House during the Obama administration.

Related reading: As part of a collection of New Yorker essays from sixteen authors on the impending Trump administration, Díaz penned a piece on the necessity of “radical resilience.”

 

Photo Credit: John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

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