Campus Reading Celebration
October 11, 2012
6:30-7:30pm
Grand Salon, CI Campus
Reservations for the event are required. Click Here to Register!
- CI Student, Faculty, or Staff: Free!
- General Ticket: $10
- Non-CI Student: $5
- A public event will be held at 6:30 p.m. on the CI Campus in Grand Salon. Following the presentation by Author Junot Diaz, there will be a book signing.
The book for the 8th annual Campus Reading Celebration is The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Author Junot Diaz. The centerpiece of the Campus Reading Celebration will be a visit by Author Junot
Diaz on October 11, 2012.
Reservations for the event are required.
The Campus Reading Celebration provides an annual opportunity for the campus community and public to share in a common intellectual experience. This year's Campus Reading Celebration book, chosen by CI students, recounts the story of Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love. Featuring the linguistic acrobatics of one of America's finest young writer's, Sam Anderson of New York Magazine writes, "Díaz finds a miraculous balance. He cuts his barnburning comic-book plots (escape, ruin, redemption) with honest, messy realism, and his narrator speaks in a dazzling hash of Spanish, English, slang, literary flourishes, and pure virginal dorkiness."
Junot Díaz's short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker magazine, which listed him as one of the 20 top writers for the 21st century. Díaz has received a Eugene McDermott Award, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, a Lila Acheson Wallace Readers Digest Award, the 2002 PEN/Malamud Award, the 2003 US-Japan Creative Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was selected as one of the 39 most important Latin American writers under the age of 39 by the Bogotá World Book Capital and the Hay Festival.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is an overwhelming critical success, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2008, John Sargent, Sr. First Novel Prize, the Dayton Peace Prize in Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award as well as appearing in over thirty-five best-of-the-year book lists. New York magazine named it the Best Novel of the Year and Time magazine's Lev Grossman named it #1 of the Top 10 Fiction Books of 2007, praising it as "a massive, heaving, sparking tragicomedy". In September 2007, Miramax acquired the rights for a film adaptation of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
Admission to this event for CI students, faculty, and staff is free. The cost for community members is $10 and $5 for non-CI students.
Community Discussion:
Join the discussion on Twitter at: #OscarWao
Parking Information: Limited parking is available on campus and is complimentary. Follow signs to designated event parking areas. Free parking is available at the Camarillo Metrolink Station /Lewis Road parking lot in Camarillo with complimentary shuttle service to and from the campus. Riders should board the CI VISTA Bus. Buses arrive and depart from the Camarillo Metrolink Station every 30 minutes from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Friday. For exact times, check the schedule at www.goventura.org.
For additional information contact Merissa Stith, Events Coordinator, at 805-437-8548 or merissa.stith@csuci.edu.