Jaquira Díaz
4301 N Michigan Ave, Miami Beach, FL 33140, United States
Nautilus Middle School where Jaquira Díaz studied.
4000 Central Florida Blvd, Orlando, FL 32816, United States
The University of Central Florida where Jaquira Díaz received a Bachelor of Arts degree.
4202 E Fowler Ave, Tampa, FL 33620, United States
The University of South Florida where Jaquira Díaz received a Master of Fine Arts degree.
2013
Jaquira Díaz with Anjanette Delgado and Amina Gautier in 2013.
2019
Jaquira Díaz with Aarti Namdev Shahani, Nefertiti Austin, Sarah M. Broom, and Adrienne Brodeur at Women Have Their Say Day of Dialog 2019.
Jaquira Díaz at Miami Film Festival party.
Jaquira Díaz with Boricua writers at Kweli Literary Festival.
Jaquira Díaz
Jaquira Díaz
Jaquira Díaz with Gabriel Bump.
Jaquira Díaz. Photo by Maria Esquinca.
Jaquira Díaz with Sheree Thomas.
Jaquira Díaz with T Kira Madden and Lidia Yuknavitch at Powell's Books.
Jaquira Díaz with her uncle in Puerto Rico.
Jaquira Díaz with Veronica Liu, Kalisha Buckhanon, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Dina Nayeri and Malcom Tariq.
Jaquira Díaz with Anna Qu.
2013
Jaquira Díaz with Anjanette Delgado and Amina Gautier in 2013.
2019
Jaquira Díaz with Aarti Namdev Shahani, Nefertiti Austin, Sarah M. Broom, and Adrienne Brodeur at Women Have Their Say Day of Dialog 2019.
4301 N Michigan Ave, Miami Beach, FL 33140, United States
Nautilus Middle School where Jaquira Díaz studied.
4000 Central Florida Blvd, Orlando, FL 32816, United States
The University of Central Florida where Jaquira Díaz received a Bachelor of Arts degree.
4202 E Fowler Ave, Tampa, FL 33620, United States
The University of South Florida where Jaquira Díaz received a Master of Fine Arts degree.
Jaquira Díaz at Miami Film Festival party.
Jaquira Díaz with Boricua writers at Kweli Literary Festival.
Jaquira Díaz
Jaquira Díaz
Jaquira Díaz with Gabriel Bump.
Jaquira Díaz. Photo by Maria Esquinca.
Jaquira Díaz with Sheree Thomas.
Jaquira Díaz with T Kira Madden and Lidia Yuknavitch at Powell's Books.
Jaquira Díaz with her uncle in Puerto Rico.
Jaquira Díaz with Veronica Liu, Kalisha Buckhanon, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Dina Nayeri and Malcom Tariq.
Jaquira Díaz with Anna Qu.
(While growing up in housing projects in Puerto Rico and M...)
While growing up in housing projects in Puerto Rico and Miami Beach, Díaz found herself caught between extremes. As her family split apart and her mother battled schizophrenia, she was supported by the love of her friends. As she longed for a family and home, her life was upended by violence. As she celebrated her Puerto Rican culture, she couldn’t find support for her burgeoning sexual identity. From her own struggles with depression and sexual assault to Puerto Rico’s history of colonialism, every page of Ordinary Girls vibrates with music and lyricism. Díaz writes with raw and refreshing honesty, triumphantly mapping a way out of despair toward love and hope, to become her version of the girl she always wanted to be.
https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Girls-Jaquira-D%C3%ADaz/dp/1616209135/?tag=2022091-20
2019
Jaquira Díaz was born in Humacao, Puerto Rico. The family lived in poverty. Díaz arrived in Miami when she was just eight years old, as her father tried to escape his drug-dealing past, and her adolescence was marked by frequent moves.
Díaz fell in love with reading early in her childhood.
Jaquira Díaz studied at Nautilus Middle School. When she was eleven, she attempted suicide for the first time. Then a few months after that, she ran away from home for the first time. And then she started getting arrested. She kept running away, kept getting arrested, kept fighting in the streets, kept trying to kill herself. She was drinking and using drugs, seeing court-appointed shrinks. She turned to books because she needed something. She was always writing.
Just after Hurricane Andrew hit Miami, Diaz's teacher Mr. Williamson gave pupils an assignment to write an essay about their experience, how their families planned for it, how they survived it, the aftermath of the storm. She turned in her essay and forgot about it. A couple of months later, she learned that he had submitted it to some writing contest for Miami-Dade County students and it was published in the Miami Herald.
Díaz has a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Central Florida and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of South Florida.
Díaz's fiction and essays are mostly set in Puerto Rico and Miami and are often focused on the intensely personal tragedies and triumphs of young women maturing in a dangerous world. Díaz writes about crime, politics, sexuality, race, music, and culture as well. She is also interested in the use of mythology and folklore in nonfiction. She has an essay in the 2016 issue of Ninth Letter, “Monster Story,” which is an attempt at this very thing. It’s about violence and family and La Llorona, among other things.
Her work appears in The Best American Essays 2016, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, The FADER, Kenyon Review, The Sun, Salon, Brevity, Tin House online, Gulf Coast, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, The Rumpus, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Longreads, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and nytimes.com, among other publications. A Writer in Residence at the Summer Literary Seminars in Tbilisi and Kenya, she is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's MFA Program in Creative Writing, and Consulting Editor at the Kenyon Review. Díaz was judging creative non-fiction for AWP’s 2016 WC&C Scholarship Competition.
Díaz's first book, Ordinary Girls (2019), a memoir, explores themes of girlhood in a dangerous world and coming of age in the projects of Puerto Rico and the streets of Miami. The second book, I am Deliberate, is planned as a novel.
Jaquira Díaz is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, two MacDowell Colony Fellowships, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, a Florida Individual Artist Fellowship, the Carl Djerassi Fiction Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, and an NEA Fellowship to the Hambidge Center for the Arts. A finalist for The Krause Essay Prize, she's been awarded fellowships or scholarships from the Sewanee Writers' Conference, Summer Literary Seminars, the Tin House Summer Writers' Workshop, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. She was listed among Remezcla's "15 Latinx Music Journalists You Should be Reading."
(While growing up in housing projects in Puerto Rico and M...)
2019Jaquira Díaz is a sort of a wanderer. She moves a lot, mostly because she never feels at home anywhere. When she travels, she observes the places she visits for signs that she belongs there, as if her place - the place where she’s meant to be - will someday reveal itself.
Her writing role models are Dorothy Allison, James Baldwin, Rebecca Solnit, Helen Oyeyemi, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Joy Williams, Jesmyn Ward, Diane Cook, Danielle Evans, Lindsay Hunter, Maggie Nelson, Jodi Angel, Randa Jarrar, Rebecca Makkai, Anne Carson, Pamela Erens, Porochista Khakpour, Karl Taro Greenfeld, Barbara Ehrenreich, William T. Vollmann, Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Melissa Chadburn, Eula Biss, Amelia Gray, Elena Passarello, Jennine Capó Crucet, Amina Gautier, Daniel Alarcón, Junot Díaz, Mayra Santos-Febres, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Antonya Nelson, Jo Ann Beard, Patricia Engel, Ru Freeman, Megan Abbott, Adriana Páramo, Sheree Renée Thomas, Lauren Groff, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Flannery O’Connor, Caitlin Horrocks, Julie Iromuanya, Angela Flournoy, Solmaz Sharif, Lacy M. Johnson, Amber Dermont, Lidia Yuknavitch, and Elizabeth George.
Quotations:
"If I wasn’t a writer, I would be lost."
"El caserío is still a place I love fiercely. It’s where I learned about danger and violence and death, sure, but it’s also where I learned to love stories, to imagine them, to dream. It’s the place I return to when I need to remember why I ever wanted to be a writer in the first place."
"Before I was a writer, I was a reader."
"Culture is everything we do that we don’t have to."
"I’m a promiscuous reader, always reading multiple books at a time, switching back and forth. I’m not a poet, but every year, I find myself reading more and more poetry collections."
Jaquira Díaz has a partner Lars Horn.
