Dan-el Padilla Peralta, the author of Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League (Penguin $27.95) will be reading from his book at Labyrinth on Thursday, October 6 at 6 p.m.

Says Publishers Weekly: “Part memoir, part confessional, and part coming-of-age tale, Peralta’s story holds several truths on the road through loss, sacrifice, and achievement to gaining his slice of the American dream.” Kirkus Reviews calls Undocumented “An impassioned and honest memoir… Underscores the need for comprehensive immigration reform.”

As a boy, Dan-el Padilla Peralta came here legally with his family. Together they left Santo Domingo behind, but life in New York City was harder than they imagined. Their visas lapsed, and the father returned home. While Dan-el was only in grade school, the family joined the ranks of the city’s homeless. He, his mother, and brother lived in a downtown shelter where his only refuge was the meager library. With the help of a young volunteer, he was accepted on scholarship to Collegiate, the oldest private school in the country. From Collegiate, he went to Princeton, where he made the decision to come out as an undocumented student in a Wall Street Journal profile a few months before he gave the salutatorian’s traditional address in Latin at his commencement.

Dan-el Padilla Peralta received his MPhil from the University of Oxford and his PhD in classics from Stanford University and will be joining the faculty of Princeton University’s Classics Department in fall of 2016.

———