Jaquira Díaz

Jaquira Diaz
Díaz at the 2019 Texas Book Festival
BornHumacao, Puerto Rico
OccupationWriter
EducationUniversity of Central Florida
University of South Florida
GenreMemoir, Essay, Fiction, Journalism
Notable awardsWhiting Award, Florida Book Award, Pushcart Prize, Jeanne Córdova Prize
Spouse
(m. 2020)

Jaquira Díaz is a Puerto Rican fiction writer, essayist, journalist, cultural critic, and professor. She is the author of Ordinary Girls, which received a Whiting Award in Nonfiction, a Florida Book Awards Gold Medal, was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Prize Finalist. She has written for The Atlantic, Time (magazine), The Best American Essays, Tin House, The Sun, The Fader, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, Longreads, . She was an editor at the Kenyon Review and a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. 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 has taught creative writing at Colorado State University's MFA program, Randolph College's low-residency MFA program, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Kenyon College. Díaz lives in New York with her spouse, British writer Lars Horn, and is an assistant professor of writing at Columbia University.