Friends of Columbia Libraries to Host Evening With Oscar Hijuelos

Friends of Columbia Libraries

to Host
Evening With Oscar Hijuelos

(NEW YORK, September 25, 2007) The Friends of the Columbia Libraries will sponsor an evening next month with Cuban-American writer Oscar Hijuelos, in conversation with Gay Talese. The event will be held at 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, October 11, at The Kellogg Center, Room 1501 of the International Affairs Building on Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus.

A second generation Cuban-American who grew up and still lives in Columbia’s upper Manhattan neighborhood, Hijuelos writes fiction that captures the spirit of Hispanic communities in New York during the postwar period. The son of a hotel worker and a homemaker who emigrated from Cuba in the 1940s, Hijuelos attended City College of New York, where he studied with the novelist Donald Barthelme. In 1990, he received the Pulitzer Prize for his second novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.

Gay Talese is a writer and former reporter for the New York Times. His most recent book is A Writer's Life, a memoir about the inner workings of a writer's life and the interplay between experience and writing.

Columbia’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library acquired a large collection of manuscripts from Hijuelos in 2006. The collection includes thousands of manuscript pages and drafts from his novels along with shorter works that document the author’s process of composition and revision.
A reception will follow the program from 7:00 to 8:30 p.m. The Kellogg Center is located on the 15th floor of the International Affairs Building of Columbia University, located at 420 West 118th Street.

For more information regarding this event or to attend, please respond to http://us.f374.mail.yahoo.com/ym/Compose?To=cul-events@columbia.edu

The Friends of Columbia Libraries aim to cultivate an informed interest in and support for the Columbia Libraries. The Friends foster the growth and improvement of the Libraries through financial and in-kind gifts and provide opportunities for creating, collecting, and preserving library materials. The Friends also promote the visibility of the Libraries through sponsorship of educational and social events.

Columbia University Libraries is one of the top ten academic library systems in the nation, with 9.2 million volumes, over 65,650 serials, as well as extensive collections of electronic resources, manuscripts, rare books, microforms, and other nonprint formats. The collections and services are organized into 25 libraries, supporting specific academic or professional disciplines. Columbia Libraries employs more than 400 professional and support staff to assist faculty, students, and researchers in their academic endeavors. The Libraries’ website at


http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/is a gateway to its print and electronic collections and to its services.