Photo: Maria Esquinca
Jaquira Díaz is the author of ORDINARY GIRLS, a memoir, and I AM DELIBERATE, a novel, both forthcoming from Algonquin Books. She is a 2016-18 Kenyon Review Fellow, and 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. 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, 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.