The Author Events Series presents Jaquira Diaz | This Is the Only Kingdom

In Conversation with Airea D. Matthews

When Maricarmen meets Rey el Cantante, beloved small-time Robin Hood and local musician on the rise, she begins to envision a life beyond the tight-knit community of el Caserío, Puerto Rico - beyond cleaning houses, beyond waiting tables, beyond the constant tug of war between the street hustlers and los camarones. But breaking free proves more difficult than she imagined, and she soon finds herself struggling to make a home for herself, for Rey, his young brother Tito, and eventually, their daughter Nena. Until one fateful day changes everything.

Fifteen years later, Maricarmen and Nena find themselves in the middle of a murder investigation as the community that once rallied to support Rey turns against them. Now Nena, a teenager haunted by loss and betrayal and exploring her sexual identity, must learn to fight for herself and her family in a world not always welcoming. For lovers of the Neapolitan novels, This is the Only Kingdom is an immersive and moving portrait of a family - and a community - torn apart by generational grief, and a powerful love letter to mothers, daughters, and the barrios that make them.

Born in Puerto Rico, Jaquira Díaz was raised between Humacao, Fajardo, and Miami Beach. She is the author of Ordinary Girls: A Memoir, winner of a Whiting Award, a Florida Book Awards Gold Medal, a Lambda Literary Awards finalist, an American Booksellers Association Indies Introduce Selection, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection, an Indie Next Pick, a Library Reads pick, and finalist for the B&N Discover Prize. The recipient of the Jeanne Córdova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction, the Alonzo Davis Fellowship from VCCA, two Pushcart Prizes, an Elizabeth George Foundation grant, and fellowships from MacDowell, the Kenyon Review, Bread Loaf, Sewanee, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the Black Mountain Institute at UNLV, Díaz has written for The Atlantic, The Guardian, Time Magazine, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Condé Nast Traveler, and The Fader, and her stories, poems, and essays have been anthologized in The Best American Essays, The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, Best American Experimental Writing, and The Pushcart Prize anthology. 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 lives in New York and teaches at Columbia University.

Airea D. Matthews received a BA in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania, as well as an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program and an MPA from the Gerald Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Bread and Circus (Scribner Books, 2023), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry, the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award, and was a finalist for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. Her poetry collection, Simulacra (Yale University Press, 2017), was selected by Carl Phillips as the winner of the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets.

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