FORUM: Florida's Caribbean Connection

The latest issue of FORUM: Florida's Caribbean Connection, has been published, and contains a two poems by Ricardo Pau-Llosa and a certain Jamaican poet whose name, for modesty’s sake, I will not mention.

Here are a few snippets from the Table of Contents:

Florida’s Caribbean Connection (Click here for full article)
Our state’s historical and cultural ties with the Caribbean have endured for more than 500 years, from pre-Columbian trading routes to modern migration.

Cauldron of Conflict
By Paul Dosal
The Caribbean has been one of the most hotly contested regions in the world.

The Story of Pedro Pan
By Jon Wilson
When Cuban children flew to freedom.

Leaving Home, Finding Home
By U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez Excerpt from A Sense of Belonging: From Castro’s Cuba to the U.S. Senate, One Man’s Pursuit of the American Dream

From Haiti, with Hope
By Connie May Fowler Lauded Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat—living an exile of blood, land, and memory.

Reading Florida
By Jon Wilson
Introducing our column about new Florida books.

Florida’s Earliest Caribbean Contact
By Bob Carr
Scholars find tantalizing clues of early contact between natives of Florida and the Caribbean.

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Junot Diaz Wins Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

Junot Diaz has won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

The citation:

For distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life, Ten thousand dollars ($10,000).

Awarded to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (Riverhead Books).

Also nominated as finalists in this category were: Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and Shakespeare's Kitchen by Lore Segal (The New Press).

For more information, please follow this link: The Pulitzer Prize.

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Edwidge Danticat and Junot Diaz: NBCC 2007 Awardees

In a bountiful year of remarkable books, two Caribbean-born writers, Edwidge Danticat and Junot Diaz won National Book Critics Circle Awards for Autobiography and Fiction at the New School's Tischman Auditorium on March 6, 2008.

The competition in both areas was intense, yet Edwidge and Junot emerged as awardees from among these other fine authors:

Autobiography

Joshua Clark, Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone (Free Press)
Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I'm Dying (Knopf)
Joyce Carol Oates, The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973–1982 (Ecco Press)
Sara Paretsky, Writing in an Age of Silence (Verso)
Anna Politkovskaya, Russian Diary: A Journalist's Final Account of Life, Corruption and Death in Putin's Russia (Random House)

Fiction

Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games (HarperCollins)
Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead Books)
Hisham Matar, In the Country of Men (Dial Press)
Joyce Carol Oates, The Gravedigger’s Daughter (Ecco Press)
Marianne Wiggins, The Shadow Catcher (Simon & Schuster)

Congratulations, Edwidge and Junot!

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(Via Critical Mass)
Pictured above: NBCC member Miriam Berkley shot this group portrait of the winners of the NBCC 2007 awards. From left,Tim Jeal, NBCC award winner in biography for "Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer" (Yale University Press), Mary Jo Bang, NBCC award winner in poetry for "Elegy" (Gray Wolf PresS), Alex Ross,NBCC award winner in criticism for "The Rest Is Noise" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Edwidge Danticat,NBCC award winner in autobiography (Knopf), Emilie Buchwald of Milkweed Press, winner of the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award; Sam Anderson,winner of the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, and Margaret Washington, NBCC award winner in nonfiction for "Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (Doubleday). Not pictured, NBCC award winner in fiction, Junot Diaz, author of "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" (Riverhead Books).

For the complete list of winners, please follow this link to Critical Mass: 2007 NBCC Winners Announced