It's not a house party in Providence, but...

It was a few years ago Janet and I learned that Junot Diaz had made appearances at certain house parties thrown by Brown students in Providence, but had never made any sort of public appearance on the campus.  Naturally, then, when I heard the Pulitzer news, I couldn't help but wonder if he'd returned to his old stomping grounds to celebrate.  In fact, I was going to post something snarky about it here, but life got busy and, well, then I came across an excerpt from an email he wrote to Gregory Cowles at the Times.

So, while Dominican intellectuals everywhere celebrate this victory by yelling even louder at their professors to include all two Dominican-written books on their Latino lit syllabi (Drown being the other), Junot wandered back from the banks of the Hackensack to his bucolic Perth Amboy home to sit with a baby on his lap and reminisce with his mother.  Who knew he had it in him to be so whimsical?  

And who knew he could write an entire paragraph without cussing?