The theme for tonight’s Black Mountain Institute Panel at UNLV is “Blurring Borders,” and there’s no better writer to speak on the subject than one of tonight’s featured guests, Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Diaz.

The author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao has personal experience in the fluidity of borders, and the topic permeates his writing, from the characters he creates right down to the words they speak. Born in the capital of the Dominican Republic, Diaz moved to New Jersey with his family when he was 6. His transnational identity features strongly in Wao, a novel that follows an overweight Dominican-American through a turbulent East Coast adolescence and back to the island that is the source of—and the answer to—his problems.

Diaz invokes both nations in words that he uses – a vibrant Spanglish that wrestles the two languages into one punchy mother tongue that can condemn a dictator’s “culocracy," compliment a girl and express utter frustration. Diaz’s language is one of a life lived across blurred borders. Who better to discuss the hazy divide than a native speaker?