Authors Helena Viramontes and Junot Diaz

Authors Helena Viramontes and Junot Diaz will give a joint reading from their own works at 4 p.m., Friday, May 4, in the Bookfellow Room, Seymour Library, Knox College, Galesburg, Illinois. The reading is free and open to the public.

Viramontes is the author of a short story collection, The Moths and Other Stories, and two novels, Under the Feet of Jesus, and Their Dogs Came with Them. Her work, which is represented in numerous anthologies of contemporary American literature, focuses on the working class neighborhood in East Los Angeles, where Viramontes was born and raised.

Currently a professor of creative writing at Cornell University, Viramontes is co-coordinator of the Los Angeles Latino Writers Association, literary editor of XhistmeArte Magazine, and co-founder of Southern California Latino Writers and Filmmakers. She has received the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, a Sundance Institute Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Luis Leal Award.

Diaz is the author of the short story collection Drown, and his work has also appeared in Story, The New Yorker and The Paris Review, and in the anthologies Best American Short Stories and African Voices. His new book, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, is scheduled for publication later this year. He teaches fiction at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.