“…if I could reach back through time and space to that girl I was, to all my girls, I would tell you to take care, to love each other, fight less, dance dance dance until you’re breathless. And goddamn, girl. Live.”

Jaquira Diaz, “Ordinary Girls, a Memoir”

Jaquira Diaz, author of the memoir Ordinary Girls, will have a Public Interview with author Erika Sanchez, the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Chair in the Latin American and Latino Studies Department at DePaul. A short reading and the interview will be followed by an open Q&A  from the Zoom audience.

Date and Time: Tuesday, October 27th, Noon – 1PM Central time
Sign up here.

Jaquira Diaz is a Queer Afro Latina memoirist and fiction writer. In her debut memoir Ordinary Girls, she writes about growing up poor in the housing projects of Puerto Rico and Miami, the history of colonialism in Puerto Rico, her father’s drug dealing, her mother’s mental illness, the violence and dissolution of her parent’s marriage, devastations and resilience in the lives of black and brown girls living on their own, and her search for home in chosen queer family. “We were the party girls,” she writes in Ordinary Girls, “hitting the clubs in booty shorts and high-top Jordans, smoking blunts on the beach. We were the wild girls who loved music and dancing. Girls who were black and brown and poor and queer. Girls who loved each other.” 

Jaquira Diaz is a 2020 Whiting Award recipient and Ordinary Girls is the winner of a Florida Book Awards Gold Medal, a 2020 Lambda Literary Awards Finalist, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Notable Selection. The book was one of Time Magazine‘s Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2019 and one of Oprah Magazine‘s 13 Books About Immigration to Read this Fall. Diaz is a Consulting Editor at the Kenyon Review and splits her time between Montréal and Miami Beach. Her second book, I Am Deliberate: A Novel, is forthcoming from Algonquin Books. 

This event is organized by DePaul University’s LGBTQ Studies Program and Latin American and the Latino Studies Department, and is cosponsored by: 

African and Black Diaspora Studies
Critical Ethnic Studies
The Center for Black Diaspora
The Center for Latino Research
The Department of English and the MFA/MA in Writing and Publishing
LGBTQ Faculty Staff Network
Critical Ethnic Studies
Slag Glass City—A Journal of the Urban Essay Arts
Women and Gender Studies
The Women’s Center

Header image by Marcus (tempoworld)

About Jadae Sweezer