Authors from the Dominican Republic and Sarajevo read from their novels chronicling the modern immigrant experience.

Junot Diaz is the winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Sargeant First Novel Prize for his debut novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Penguin Group). In Oscar Wao, a nerdy, sexually frustrated teenager tries to grow up under the watchful eye of his mother, grandmother and sister, and a family curse that just won’t go away. Alternating between New Jersey and the Dominican Republic, Junot’s own birthplace, this often hilarious and heartbreaking novel illuminates the modern immigrant experience through fictionalized footnotes and multi-generational storytelling.

Aleksandar Hemon is the author of The Question of Bruno and Nowhere Man, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Born in Sarajevo, Hemon visited Chicago in 1992, intending to stay for a matter of months. While he was there, Sarajevo came under siege, and he was unable to return home. Hemon wrote his first story in English in 1995. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003 and a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation in 2004.

Saskia Sassen is the Lynd Professor of Sociology and Member, The Committee on Global Thought, at Columbia University. Her recent books are Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton University Press 2006), and A Sociology of Globalization (Norton 2007). She wrote a lead essay in the 2006 Venice Biennale of Architecture Catalogue.