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The Hindu
03-08-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
Reading Itself is the Comfort: Junot Díaz
Published : Aug 03, 2025 11:04 IST - 8 MINS READ Born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey, US, Junot Díaz is the author of four books, including The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Over his career, Díaz has been awarded a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, a Lila Acheson Wallace Reader's Digest Award, the 2002 PEN/Malamud Award, and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Díaz is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a MacArthur fellow, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. As a child, Díaz recalls how he once retrieved free books with a shopping cart, which sparked his initial curiosity and love for literature from an early age. From his childhood influences of reading science fiction and dystopian authors like Richard Adams, Isaac Asimov, and especially John Christopher, Díaz was drawn to works of writers such as Toni Morrison, Octavia E. Butler, and Maxine Hong Kingston, among others, during his college years at Rutgers and Cornell. These authors and the books they wrote for a time of reading and not our age of screens, he says, had an intense focus which is distinct from today's digital age. In this interview, Junot Díaz discusses his lifelong relationship with books and reading that has shaped his journey as an immigrant. He explains why he sees himself as a reader first, reflects on the humanising joy literature has brought him, and how navigating two cultures through books has helped him integrate memory and consciousness into his writing. Edited excerpts: Give us a sense of your relationship with books and reading, given your journey from Santo Domingo to New Jersey, and how your writing is influenced by both Dominican and American cultures? Best answer to that vastness is to hand you my four books (this includes my children's book Islandborn). I do not have any real encompassing sense of the impact of the Dominican Republic and the US on me—only my struggle to understand these impacts which play out in my literature. My brain cannot hold it all but literature—as a technology of consciousness of memory of sentience sapience of experience—can. I am a reader first and foremost, more than I am a writer, which has impacted my production clearly. I'd rather read than write. Such loyalty to the literature ain't done good things to my writing career but it has been a humanising joy to my soul or my humanity. How have your reading tastes and preferences evolved over the years as you navigated your life as an immigrant, a student at Rutgers and Cornell, and later as a writer and professor? One hopes that with age, one's reading tastes broaden and deepens (and that similarly one's intellectual, emotional, and philosophical qualities also). Whether this is true or not in the latter regard, I cannot say. The work must show. But there's no question my reading has become more catholic and more intensely curious the older I've gotten. There are books and writers I would never have tolerated when I was in my 20s that I now find indispensable. George Eliot and Frank Chin, for example. My immigrant self needed maps and codes with which to navigate the world I gained (New Jersey) and the world I lost (Dominican Republic). I needed escapes to deal with my poverty and family madness. Now I have therapy, and I am more rectified to my homelands—past and present. The old gusting holes within my heart no longer run the show as they once did. I will not say that I've transcended my earlier preoccupations—only that they have aged into something less instrumental, more profoundly existential, a richer vintage. Any early reading life memory or influence from your childhood while growing up in the Dominican Republic, or in New Jersey that left a lasting impression on you? I wrote an essay a little while back: about finding a classified ad in the newspaper offering free books and how my young poor self grabbed a shopping cart and went and got those free books and that's how I started my library. I have nephews who won't get off the couch or drop the phone to save their lives (exaggeration but not by much) and yet, here I was eager to push a shopping cart four miles to pick up some old paperbacks in the middle of the summer. That eagerness to be near books still drives my love of reading today and forms the initial velocity that sent my writing into the skies. Also Read | Reading is good when it disturbs you: Amitava Kumar Is there some book or literary figure from your childhood, or something you read after arriving in the US, that made a big impression on you and is close to your heart? I went through many ages and many loves as a young reader. Richard Adams, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Andre Norton, Lloyd Alexander, John Christopher. Given the time I came up in—the 70s and the 80s—apocalyptic writers had an enormous impact. The Wyndhams of that particular corner of the book world. But it was John Christopher that was dearest to me in those years. I read everything he ever wrote and I'm still trying to equal the power that his Tripods and Sword of the Spirits trilogy had on me. Were there any books or authors that profoundly influenced you during your college years at Rutgers, or at Cornell while you were trying to find your literary voice as a writer of colour in America? Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Maxine Hong Kingston, Salman Rushdie, Edward Rivera, Sandra Cisneros, Samuel R. Delany—these formed the protein chains of my literary DNA. How much they taught me. How I continue to return to their books. These are writers whose books were intensely written for a time of reading and not our age of screens. Writers whose deep deliberations meant everything to me, who understood that resistance to colonial racial oppression begins not with performance or outrage but with humble inventory of one's complicity. College in the early 90s was a joy because this was a time when one could focus, one could read intensely, and when conversation with people was an essential way we continued our conversation with our reading. I learned so much not just from these writers and their works, but from the people around me who were reading these writers at the same time. To pour out one's reaction into another ear and heart is quite different from writing a blog post, and I, for one, was glad I had to process my reading through people. Name some books or authors that you find yourself returning to often. What draws you back to them? Édouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, Arundhati Roy, Toni Morrison, Natsuo Kirino, J.R.R. Tolkien, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Edwidge Danticat. These are writers whose insights and formal dimensions continue to challenge me as a reader and a writer. These are literary artists who started conversations that I cannot resist joining, but which will never finish. Why precisely? No idea. I could list for pages why these books draw me, and yet never evoke the mysterious gravity that brings and keeps one in a book. Any book(s) that is kind of a comfort read for you: something you keep on your bedside table and read a little before going to bed? I'm an incorrigible reader. Reading itself is the comfort. Are there some books you frequently give away as gifts to friends or family members, that you believe everyone should read? I always give away [books by] Octavia Butler, Edwidge Danticat, and Haruki Murakami. They are writers that enchant both experienced and novice readers alike; they are writers with profound things to say, and they have written a number of very slender, un-intimidating novels. Have you discovered any books or authors later in life that somewhat changed your perspective about life or writing? Say, some underrated writers or authors outside the mainstream, traditional literary canon whose books are not easily available anymore. William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land is disturbing and brilliant, and not enough folks have read it. Not enough folks read Frank Chin's work or Anjana Appachana's. All these writers are unsettling in the truest sense of the word. To discover what I mean one must read them, naturally. Also Read | Social movements influenced me more than any single writer: Banu Mushtaq What are you currently reading? Any recent works—fiction, non-fiction, poetry—that stood out for you? Max Hastings' history of the Korean War. Richard Cowper's The Twilight of Briareus. Elif Shafak's Black Milk. All dynamite for totally different reasons. Recommend some books that have influenced your understanding of the immigrant experience in America, or book(s) that resonated with your sense of identity as a Dominican-American. Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior. Edward Rivera's Family Installments. Oscar Hijuelos' Our House in the Last World. Cristina García's Dreaming in Cuban. Gish Jen's Typical American. V.S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival. Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory and Krik? Krak!. These are some of my absolute essentials. Imagine you are hosting a literary dinner party and you can invite only three writers—Dominican, Caribbean, or Latinx, both living or dead. Who would you choose, and why? Gabriel García Márquez, Frantz Fanon, Toni Morrison. As someone of African descent I included members of the African diaspora. I think these writers would have the best time together and would produce the kind of 'good trouble' we all need. Majid Maqbool is an independent journalist and writer based in Kashmir. Bookmarks is a fortnightly column where writers reflect on the books that shaped their ideas, work, and ways of seeing the world.
Forbes
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
American Academy In Rome Announces This Year's Rome Prize Winners
The American Academy of Rome has announced the 35 winners of this year's Rome Prize. The 2025-26 recipients of the highly prestigious Rome Prize were announced today by the American Academy in Rome. The Rome Prize is awarded annually to American artists and scholars for research and work in the arts and humanities. This year's winners will be officially recognized during the Janet & Arthur Ross Rome Prize Ceremony this evening at the City University of New York Graduate Center. There are 35 recipients of the Rome Prize this year. Each one will receive a stipend, workspace, and room and board at the Academy's eleven-acre campus on the Janiculum Hill in Rome, starting this fall. The stipend is $16,000 for a half-term (five months) and $30,000 for a full-term period of work in residence (10 months). The Rome Prize has traditionally been awarded in eleven disciplines: ancient studies, architecture, design, historic preservation and conservation, landscape architecture, literature, medieval studies, modern Italian studies, music composition, Renaissance and early modern studies, and visual arts. This year, a new pilot Rome Prize will be awarded in a twelfth field — environmental arts & humanities, designed 'for collaborative efforts between artists and scholars working jointly on projects that help expand our understanding of the way human beings relate to, experience, and process their encounters with the natural world.' This year's awardees were selected from 990 applicants in 44 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and 17 different countries. The acceptance rate, determined by juries of distinguished artists and scholar was 3.54 percent. 'The Rome Prize is one of the world's most prestigious fellowship programs and provides the rare opportunity for scholars and artists across a range of sub-fields to collaborate with each other,' said Peter N. Miller, President of the American Academy in Rome, in the press release. 'Presented with the opportunity to deeply engage with their work and with that of the other fellows, Rome Prize winners return home with perspectives profoundly enriched by their immersion in an interdisciplinary community set in Rome. The winners form the heart of the Academy, embodying its ethos and extending its international impact through their work now and into the future,' added Miller. Here is the complete list of the 2025–26 Rome Prize winners, plus the winner of the Tsao Family Rome Prize. Paula Gaither, Department of Classics, Stanford University; Cynthia Liu, Department of Classics, University of Oxford; William Pedrick, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University; and Dennis E. Trout, Department of Classics, Archaeology, and Religion, University of Missouri. and Darcy Tuttle, Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology Graduate Group, University of California, Berkeley. Akima Brackeen, School of Architecture, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; and Cory Henry, Principal and Founder, Atelier Cory Henry, Los Angeles, CA. Heather Scott Peterson, Department of Architecture, Woodbury University; and Ginny Sims-Burchard, Proprietor and Studio Artist, Ginny Sims Ceramics, Minneapolis. Sean Mooney, Managing Director and Chief Curator, Rock Foundation, New York; Chuna McIntyre, Founder and Director, Nunamta Yup'ik Eskimo Singers and Dancers; Katharine Ogle, Department of English, University of Southern California; Adam Summers, Department of Biology and the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, University of Washington. Claudia Chemello, Principal and Co-founder, Terra Mare Conservation, Charleston, SC; and Paul Mardikian, Principal and Co-founder, Terra Mare Conservation, Charleston, SC. Tameka Baba, Landscape Architecture Section, Knowlton School, Ohio State University; Sean Burkholder, Department of Landscape Architecture, Stuart Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania; and Karen Lutsky, Landscape Architecture, College of Design, University of Minnesota. Maya Binyam, Department of Literature, Claremont McKenna College; and David Keplinger, MFA Program in Creative Writing, Department of Literature, American University. Nastasya Kosygina, Program in Visual Studies, University of California, Irvine; and John Mulhall, Department of History, Purdue University. Charles Leavitt, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Notre Dame; and Kevin Martín, Department of Italian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. Lembit Beecher, Composer, New York, NY; and Oswald Huỳnh, Composer, Portland, Oregon. Eva Del Soldato, Department of Francophone, Italian and Germanic Studies, University of Pennsylvania; and Margo H. Weitzman, Department of Art History, Rutgers University. Daniel J. Sheridan, Independent Scholar, Knoxville, Tennessee. Jennifer Bornstein, Department of Art, University of California, Irvine; T.J. Dedeaux-Norris, Department of Painting and Drawing, School of Art, Art History, and Design, University of Iowa; Andrea Fraser, Department of Art, University of California, Los Angeles; Liz Glynn, Department of Art, University of California, Irvine Heather Hart, Department of Art and Design, Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University; and Jefferson Pinder, Department of Sculpture, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Founded in 1894 under the leadership of American architect Charles F. McKim, the American Academy in Rome was chartered by an Act of Congress in 1905. In addition to McKim, other early supporters included Harvard College, The Carnegie Foundation, J.P. Morgan, The Rockefeller Foundation, and William K. Vanderbilt. The academy is supported today by private donations from individuals and foundations and by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Since its founding the American Academy of Rome has served as a center for research and creativity, allowing its residents to immerse themselves in the experience of Rome and be enriched by fellow members. Residents and fellows of the Academy have received 622 Guggenheim Fellowships, 74 Pulitzer Prizes, 54 MacArthur Fellowships, 26 Grammy awards, 5 Pritzker Prizes, 9 Poet Laureate appointments, and 5 Nobel Prizes.
