Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Diaz was born in the Dominican Republic but has lived in the U.S. for 34 years. He is even more fluent in English than he is in Spanish. But he says there never will come a point in his life when he stops being an immigrant.
There never will be a time, he says, when he won't feel at least a little bit like an outsider - when he can stop being hyper-aware of himself and his own responses, or stop scrambling to make sense of the bewildering country in which he has inexplicably landed.
Immigrants are constantly constructing narratives in their own heads that explain the world around them, Diaz says. So, of course, are writers.
"There are similarities," he says.
"But is that one of the things that made me a writer? I don't know. I've become much more wary in recent years of how we parse the unconsciousness, how we explain the unknowable. So many writers are not immigrants, and not all immigrants are writers. I've wrestled with the question of what makes me a writer 70 different ways."
The irony, of course, is that some would consider the author himself to be the ultimate insider. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was widely acclaimed by the literary establishment and won a slew of awards, including a 2008 Pulitzer Prize. Diaz, 40, will read an excerpt from his book Saturday, when he is the featured speaker at the CityLit Festival at the Enoch Pratt Free Library.
The sixth annual festival, which is free and open to the public, has probably never fielded a stronger lineup:
Mark Doty will read from Fire to Fire, which won the 2008 National Book Award for Poetry. There will be appearances by Liza Mundy and Barbara Seals, two authors who have penned biographies of first lady Michelle Obama, and presentations by such well-known local poets as Michael Collier and Elizabeth Spires. In addition, Baltimore Sun editors Nancy Johnston and Dave Rosenthal, who operate the Read Street blog, will moderate panel discussions about new authors and the future of the book culture in the U.S.
But it's Diaz's reading that's generating the most buzz, and with good reason.
Chatting with the author can be lots of fun. His mind is always probing, analyzing, wondering. Ask Diaz even a halfway intelligent question, and he responds with a cascade of words that moves fast and throws up spray against the confining banks. The stream of his thoughts is so vigorous that even when it branches out into the surrounding countryside, it doesn't detract from the overall momentum of his argument.
