Born in Puerto Rico, Jaquira Díaz was raised between Humacao, Fajardo, and Miami Beach. She is the author of Ordinary Girls: A Memoir, winner of a Whiting Award, a Florida Book Awards Gold Medal, an American Booksellers Association Indies Introduce Selection, an Indie Next Pick, a LibraryReads pick, and finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards and the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize. Díaz is a recipient of the Jeanne Córdova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction, the Alonzo Davis Fellowship from Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, two Pushcart Prizes, an Elizabeth George Foundation grant, and fellowships from MacDowell, The Kenyon Review, Bread Loaf, Sewanee, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the Black Mountain Institute at University of Las Vegas. Díaz has written for The Atlantic, The Guardian, TIME Magazine, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Condé Nast Traveler, and The Fader, and her stories, poems, and essays have been anthologized in The Best American Essays, The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, Best American Experimental Writing, and The Pushcart Prize anthology. 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 lives in New York and teaches at Columbia University.
Jaquira is joining the Book Festival to discuss her new book, This Is the Only Kingdom: A Novel.
