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Jaquira Díaz

Jaquira Díaz is a Puerto Rican fiction writer, essayist, journalist, cultural critic, and professor. She is the author of Ordinary Girls, which received a Whiting Award in Nonfiction, a Florida Book Awards Gold Medal, was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Prize Finalist. She has written for The Atlantic, Time (magazine), The Best American Essays, Tin House, The Sun, The Fader, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, Longreads, [1] and other places. She was an editor at the Kenyon Review and a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.[2] In 2022, she held the Mina Hohenberg Darden Chair in Creative Writing at Old Dominion University's MFA program and a Pabst Endowed Chair for Master Writers at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. She has taught creative writing at Colorado State University's MFA program, Randolph College's low-residency MFA program, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Kenyon College.[3] Díaz lives in New York with her spouse, British writer Lars Horn, and is an Assistant Professor of Writing at Columbia University.[4]

Jaquira Diaz
Díaz at the 2019 Texas Book Festival
Díaz at the 2019 Texas Book Festival
BornHumacao, Puerto Rico
OccupationWriter
GenreMemoir, Essay, Fiction, Journalism
Notable awardsWhiting Award, Florida Book Award, Pushcart Prize, Jeanne Córdova Prize
Spouse
​
(m. 2020)​

Early life

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Jaquira Díaz was born in Puerto Rico. Her family lived in the Puerto Rican housing projects, colloquially referred to as el caserío. The neighborhood was made up of government housing, and had something of a dangerous reputation. Díaz, in an interview she gave to Origins, tells stories of being menaced by a machete-armed man, and of raids by the local Police force, referred to as los camarones.[5] When she was older, her family moved to Miami after rotating between Humacao and Fajardo.[6] Growing up in Miami Beach during what she describes as the city's "urban blight,"[7][8] she had a difficult life, marked by drug use, attempts at suicide, and encounters with the law.[9][10] Díaz contributes some of her identity issues to being what she describes as "a closeted queer girl"[11] in a neighborhood where gay people were harassed and attacked. Another issue was the family's financial situation. Her father, who had studied at the University of Puerto Rico and whom she describes as a lover of poetry and literature, became a drug dealer in order to support the family.[12] As she grew older, writing continued to be an important outlet for her, and her writing developed a semi-autobiographical character, often dealing with suicide, drug use, and identity.[13] Her memoir Ordinary Girls highlights her experience as a Queer Afro-Latina women growing up in a turbulent and homophobic household. [14]A famous memoir published by Jaquira after 12+ years of writing is "Ordinary Girls" which not only discusses these issues of poverty, sexism, racism, violence, abuse, addiction, mental illness, etc, but puts into perspective why all of these experiences shaped who she is as a woman today and her attempts to tell the erased history of Afro-Latinx people all over the world.[15]

Career

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Díaz's fiction and essays, which are predominantly set in Puerto Rico and Miami, have been described as "lyrical" and "urgent" and are often focused on the intensely personal tragedies and triumphs of young women maturing in a dangerous world.[16] In addition to her literary writing, Díaz writes about crime, politics, sexuality, race, music, and culture, and has been described as an elegant prose stylist.[17] In 2017, Los Angeles Times critic Walton Muyumba listed Díaz as "part of a necessary cipher of extremely gifted freestylers" that includes writers Ta-Nehisi Coates, Isabel Wilkerson, Carol Anderson, Claudia Rankine, Terrance Hayes, Kiese Laymon, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Junot Díaz, and Jelani Cobb,[18] and she was listed among Remezcla's "15 Latinx Music Journalists You Should be Reading"[19] and was included in NPR's Alt.Latino's Favorites: The Songs of 2017, as one of "the cream of the crop of Latinx music writers."[20] In 2018, Electric Literature's Ivelisse Rodriguez named her among the writers who "are changing the topography of Puerto Rican literature," describing Díaz's essays as being "about the awakening of sexual desire and the sexual threat all women experience."[21]

Díaz holds a B.A. from the University of Central Florida and an M.F.A. from the University of South Florida, and has been the recipient of fellowships from The Kenyon Review, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the Ragdale Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The MacDowell Colony, the Tin House Summer Writers' Workshop, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and an NEA Distinguished Fellowship from the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences.[22] In 2022, she was awarded a Shearing Fellowship from the Berverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute (BMI).[23]

In May 2018, Díaz announced that she had signed a two-book deal with Algonquin Books;[24] the first book, Ordinary Girls, a memoir, will be published by Algonquin on October 29, 2019, and will explore themes of girlhood in a dangerous world, and coming of age in the projects of Puerto Rico and the streets of Miami. In Díaz's memoir she emphasizes her struggles dealing with her identity, trauma, and family. Her authentic writing style sheds light on difficult topics and brings awareness.[25] Though Ordinary Girls is considered a memoir, Jaquira Diaz refers to it is a "anti-memoir" in efforts to resist the idea that her book would take place chronologically like traditional memoirs.[1] Many editors were interested in Ordinary Girls, but did not like the non-traditional method Jaquira Diaz used for the creation of it. Ordinary Girls was created so that anyone whose picks it up can start at any point and still learn lessons regarding the systems of oppressions, colonialism, maginalization of black and brown people, etc.[2] Jaquira Diaz did not like the concept of giving people something good to feel after reading, she feels as though resilience is making people avoid uncomfortabtable conversations such as the ones she discusses relating to her personal life.[3] The second book, I am Deliberate, will be a novel.[26][27]

Díaz teaches in the Writing program at Columbia University School of the Arts.

Personal Life

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Jaquira Diaz is a queer Afro-Latina who grew up in the public housing projects of Puerto Rico who later moved to Miami.[4] Jaquira Diaz spent most of her life as a "juvenile delinquent" on the streets since she would run away a lot to avoid issues involving her family or self-image issues that were shaped around anger.[5] Jaquira's father was a drug dealer while her mother was described as "temperamental and violent" upon being diagnosed with schizophrenia.[6] The author uses Ordinary Girls to further explain the issues she grew up with revolving her family life, struggle from poverty, and all forms of violence she faced due to her race, gender, sexuality, etc.[7] Jaquira Diaz met her partner who is also a writer in December 2018 and believes that she plays a huge role in her growth by helping her with addressing issues she did not confront on her own.[8]

Jaquira Diaz is a professor that uses the platform to teach her students how to break the traditional norms of literature to encourage conversations among her readers rather than making them think everything they read has to be about "resilience or survival".[9]


Selected works

Memoirs
  • Ordinary Girls (October 2019) ISBN 978-1616209131
Essays
Short stories
Other work

Awards and honors

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References

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  1. ^ Ruiz, Matthew Ismael (16 October 2017). "15 Latinx Music Journalists You Should Be Reading". Remezcla. Retrieved 16 December 2017.
  2. ^ "Kenyon Review Newsletter, September 2018". Kenyon Review. 1 September 2018. Retrieved 5 November 2018.
  3. ^ "Black Mountain Institute Announces 2022-23 Fellows". University of Nevada, Las Vegas. 12 September 2022. Retrieved 26 September 2022.
  4. ^ "Jaquira Díaz". Black Mountain Institute. 15 August 2022. Retrieved 2022-09-27.
  5. ^ MacCauley, Jennifer Maritza (5 March 2016). "Life, Story, Action: Jaquira Díaz". Origins. Retrieved 16 December 2017.
  6. ^ Inskeep, Steve (October 29, 2019). "In New Memoir 'Ordinary Girls,' Jaquira Díaz Searches For Home". In New Memoir 'Ordinary Girls,' Jaquira Díaz Searches For Home. Retrieved October 29, 2024.
  7. ^ "Ask a Local: Jaquira Díaz, Miami Beach, FL". The Common. 30 July 2015. Retrieved 17 December 2017.
  8. ^ Martinez, Nicole (17 September 2015). "15 Views of Miami, as told by Jaquira Díaz". The New Tropic. Retrieved 11 January 2018.
  9. ^ Martinez, Nicole (17 September 2015). "15 Views of Miami, as told by Jaquira Díaz". The New Tropic. Retrieved 11 January 2018.
  10. ^ "The Kenyon Review Conversations: Jaquira Díaz". The Kenyon Review. 1 November 2015. Retrieved 17 December 2017.
  11. ^ Seriously Entertaining: Jaquira Díaz on "Other Side of Reason", February 2021, retrieved 2023-02-16
  12. ^ Philyaw, Deesha. "VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Jaquira Díaz". Retrieved 16 December 2017.
  13. ^ MacCauley, Jennifer Maritza (5 March 2016). "Life, Story, Action: Jaquira Díaz". Origins. Retrieved 16 December 2017.
  14. ^ "Jaquira Diaz on place, Ana Maria Cardona, and her memoir, Ordinary Girls – Apogee Journal". Retrieved 2024-11-11.
  15. ^ ""Either Hyper-Visible or Invisible": An Interview with Jaquira Díaz". Los Angeles Review of Books. 2019-10-29. Retrieved 2024-10-29.
  16. ^ Philyaw, Deesha (17 August 2016). "VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Jaquira Díaz". The Rumpus. Retrieved 16 December 2017.
  17. ^ Peña, Daniel. "Las Damas: The New Generation of Latina Writers". Ploughshares. Retrieved 16 December 2017.
  18. ^ Muyumba, Walton (29 September 2017). "Ta-Nehisi Coates blazes a singular intellectual path in 'We Were Eight Years in Power'". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 16 December 2017.
  19. ^ Ruiz, Matthew Ismael (16 October 2017). "15 Latinx Music Journalists You Should Be Reading". Remezcla. Retrieved 16 December 2017.
  20. ^ Contreras, Felix (21 December 2017). "Alt.Latino's Favorites: The Songs of 2017". NPR.org (Alt.Latino). Retrieved 23 December 2017.
  21. ^ Rodriguez, Ivelisse (August 15, 2018). "16 Puerto Rican Women and No-binary Writers Telling New Stories". Electric Literature.
  22. ^ "The Kenyon Review Fellowships History". Kenyon Review. Retrieved 2017-12-16.
  23. ^ "Black Mountain Institute Announces 2022–23 Fellows". University of Nevada, Las Vegas. 2022-09-09. Retrieved 2022-09-27.
  24. ^ Díaz, Jaquira (22 May 2018). "For the last ten years, I've been writing a book about girls. A few months ago, my fierce and wonderful agent, @michellebrower said, "Tell me your dreams, and I will work to make them come true." And then she did. I can't wait to share this book with you". Twitter. Retrieved 2018-11-07.
  25. ^ Díaz, Jaquira (2019). Ordinary girls: a memoir (First ed.). Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. ISBN 978-1-61620-913-1.
  26. ^ Musgrave-Johnson, Devon (September 15, 2016). "Meet the New KR Fellows, Margaree Little and Jaquira Diaz". Kenyon Collegian.
  27. ^ Rodriguez, Ivelisse (August 15, 2018). "16 Puerto Rican and Non-binary Writers Telling New Stories". Electric Literature.
  28. ^ "Jaquira Díaz Wins 2023 Jeanne Córdova Prize in Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction". Lambda Literary. 7 June 2023. Retrieved 7 June 2023.
  29. ^ "Black Mountain Institute Announces 2022-2023 Fellows". Black Mountain Institute at UNLV. 20 September 2022. Retrieved 7 June 2023.
  30. ^ "Jaquira Díaz Awarded 2022 Alonzo Davis Fellowship". VCCA. 15 Nov 2022. Retrieved 7 June 2023.
  31. ^ "Paul Wilborn Takes Gold Medal in Florida Book Awards". Tampa Bay Times. 5 March 2020. Retrieved 12 March 2020.[dead link‍]
  32. ^ "These Are The Finalists for the 2020 Lambda Literary Awards". The Oprah Magazine. 10 March 2020. Retrieved 12 March 2020.
  33. ^ "Adam, Young Win B&N Discover Awards". Publishers Weekly. 31 January 2020. Retrieved 22 March 2020.
  34. ^ "Adam, Young Win B&N Discover Awards". Publishers Weekly. 31 January 2020. Retrieved 22 March 2020.
  35. ^ "2017 International Literary Award Winners". The Center for Women Writers. 1 August 2017. Retrieved 16 December 2017.
  36. ^ "The Essay Prize 2016 Nominees". The Essay Prize. 1 October 2016. Archived from the original on 2 June 2018. Retrieved 1 December 2017.
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