Dominicana author Loida Maritza Pérez, a 1987 Cornell University alumna, is the keynote speaker at the Latino Studies Program's eighth annual Unity Dinner Friday, Oct. 20, at 5:30 p.m. in the Willard Straight Hall Memorial Room. Tickets are $5 and can be purchased through the LSP office in 434 Rockefeller Hall.

On Saturday, Oct. 21, Pérez will read from her acclaimed novel, Geographies of Home at 3:30 p.m. in the A. D. White House on campus.

The Unity Dinner on Friday also includes talks and performances by Sabor Latino Dance Ensemble, Teatrotaller, Phenomenon and members of the Latino Living Center, Latino Fraternities and Latina Sororities.

Pérez was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in Brooklyn, NY. She attended Cornell and currently teaches creative writing in New Mexico.Geographies of Home explores how immigrants struggle to adapt in a new country. Pérez began her novel as an undergraduate at Cornell in an autobiographical writing course then taught by Henry Louis Gates. She is the winner of several fellowships including Djerassi's Pauline and Henry Louis Gates Sr. Fellowship in 1996, the 1994 Ragdale Foundation's U.S.-Africa Writers Project, and a 1992 New York Foundation for the Arts grant for writing.

For more information, contact Marti Dense at LSP, 434 Rockefeller Hall, (607) 255-3197.