It is my great pleasure, this evening,
to introduce Manuel Muñoz, who we have been very fortunate
to include on our fiction faculty this year.
Manuel is the author of two collections of short stories,
so far, Zigzagger and The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, which
was shortlisted for the 2007 Frank O'Connor International
Short Story Prize.
He's also the recipient of a 2006 National
Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship
and is currently a 2008 fellow in fiction with the New York
Foundation for the Arts.
His work has appeared in numerous publications,
including the New York Times, Rush Hour, Swink, Epoch,
Glimmer Train, Edinburgh Review, and Boston Review
and has aired on National Public Radio's "Selected Shorts."
We have just received news, happily,
that Manuel has received, for 2008, a Whiting Writer's
Award, which is a very prestigious award,
awarded each year to the ten most important emerging writers
in the country.
And he joins such company as previous winners Denis Johnson,
Jorie Graham, Mark Doty, Jeffrey Eugenides, our own David Foster
Wallace, and others.
Manuel is a writer's writer, in that he understands the craft,
beautifully.
He understands the kinds of things
that writers, who are alert to such,
point of view, release of info, voice,
all the kinds of technical things that we stand in awe of.
He understands them well enough so
that he can break those rules.
And it's quite clear that he knows what he's doing.
He's much admired as a writer by other writers,
but he's also a writer for everyone.
He creates a very specific world in his fiction.
In The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue,
for example, the world of Gold Avenue is as specific
and fully realized as Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County,
for example.
Too often, writers who write from such a specific world
are subject to dreaded terms, like regional,
or some such other modifier.
But not Manuel.
When we read him, we instantly recognize
that he's writing from a world to the world.
And we recognize that we're in the presence of one
of those rare writers who's able to, as Aristotle put it,
"create those concrete universals,"
to give us a world that, while it's his,
also magically becomes ours.
Manuel.
[APPLAUSE]