One of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Diaz's favorite subjects is a society's ability to accept immigrants. When he made an appearance in Richard White Lecture Hall Wednesday night, Duke certainly had no trouble accepting him.
Diaz met with frequent applause and laughter from the standing-room only crowd, few of them undergraduates. He read passages from his short story "The Sun, The Moon, The Stars," first published in The New Yorker in 1998, and his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Diaz also fielded questions from the audience, which touched on subjects ranging from the increased safety of nerds under the Obama administration to why he writes about spurned women so often.
"I'm almost always interested in the losers of any equation," he said of the latter. "When it comes down to it, at the most basic level, happy people-they're almost impossible to write about."
Diaz's banter was peppered with obscenities and colloquialisms, which often collided in entertaining ways with his literary intelligence.
"When you're a nerd, your ghetto pass is tenuous," he said, in one of the evening's finer examples.
Diaz is an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, which he left at the age of six. Dominican identity played a large role in both his answers and the short story, which is about, in his words, "a dumba-" who visits the island with his girlfriend as their relationship is spiraling.
"You no deserve I speak Spanish to you," and "Let me confess: I love Santo Domingo," are two lines from the story that hint at the author's complex relationship with the island and his mother tongue. English was the first language he learned to read. Diaz said Dominicans often look down on this when he returns to the island.
Jenny Snead Williams, executive director of the Program in Latino/a Studies in the Global South, said Diaz was brought to Duke through a combined effort by the program and Lambda Upsilon Lambda Fraternity, Inc.
"This is very unique in that the students came to us and said, 'We'd really like to bring [Diaz],'" she said.
The combined effort between the students and the program was essential to its success, she said. Both groups explored different methods of raising the necessary funds. The event was more costly than most functions the Program in Latino/a Studies had previously held.
"We're still a fairly new program, about an 11-year history," she said. "All of our events so far leading up to this have been much smaller scale."
Freshman Hilary Henry heard about Diaz's appearance through one of her Latino/a studies classes. She purchased his novel after being impressed by the appearance.
"He's very funny and intellectual," she said.
Freshmen Kimberley Goffe. who found out about the event through Facebook, agreed.
"He's not one of those stuck-up writer, literary people," she said. "He was very down-to-Earth, relaxed."
Durham resident Kendra Sena caught word that Diaz was coming to Duke after her book group read his novel. She ended up bringing Anne O'Neil-Henry, a graduate student in romance studies. Neither was disappointed.
"I really liked the short story too," O'Neil said. "I wish he'd finished it, because I really want to know what happened."
Throughout the night, Diaz wove in a message for the college educated, himself included.
"College kids think they're mad cool, until they go home and see the people we left at home," he said. "Compared to them, we're supernerds, man."
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