Junot Díaz has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Of all that our zeitgeist is composed, the popular praise for this book is surely part. In this time, a major-party political candidate invites citizens to hope for a society that is post-racial, or at least post-"racial" as that term has been handed down for a generation. And Oscar Wao, peppered with Spanish slangs and devoted to a New Jersey-raised Dominican sci-fi nerd, a subculture within a subculture about as far off the radar as an American life can get, wins America's premier literary prize, a prize which honors "distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life (italics mine)." The Pulitzer committee is again right on in making an award based on the quality of the writing, and the richness of its expression. I'm thinking of past winners Richard Ford, Michael Chabon, authors who get at something profound, subtle, iconoclastic, heartbreaking, and hilarious in American life. Díaz's book evidences not only great talent employing our flexible language, but great heart and humanity as well. This heart, apparent in Junot the person during his visits with us in Key West for the Seminar, is displayed in this quote from an interview he gave to New York Magazine:

'When I talk to people I'm such a dumbass. ... When I enter that higher-order space that's required to write, I'm a better human. For whatever my writing is, wherever it's ranked, it definitely is the one place that I get to be beautiful.

The audio below is a recording of Díaz reading from and discussing Oscar Wao during this January's Seminar. The pictures which follow after the jump, also from January, come from Jason Rowan. That's Junot talking with a Seminar attendee after his reading, Junot talking with KWLS board members Judy Blume and Lynn Kaufelt, Junot and Billy Collins pontificating, and Junot and Kevin Young right next-door to KWLS administrative headquarters at one of our famous parties. Congratulations to Junot. We're looking forward to seeing him again.