ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Junot Díaz,  born December 31, 1968, is a Dominican-American  writer and creative writing professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Central to Díaz’s work is the immigrant experience . He received  the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Díaz was born in Villa Juana, a neighborhood of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic  He was the third child in a family of five. Throughout most of his early childhood, he lived with his mother and grandparents while his father worked in the United States. Díaz emigrated to Parlin, NJ in 1974 and was re-united with his father. There he lived less than a mile from what he has described as "one of the largest landfills in New Jersey.” He attended Madison Park Elementary  and was a voracious reader,  often walking four miles in order to borrow books from his public library. At this time Díaz became fascinated with apocalyptic films and books, especially the work of John Christopher, the original Planet of the Apes films, and the BBC mini-series Edge of Darkness. Díaz graduated from Cedar Ridge High School (now merged to form Old Bridge High School) inOld Bridge Township,  NJ in 1987 and attended Kean College in Union, New Jersey for one year before transferring and ultimately completing his BA at Rutgers College in 1992, majoring in English. At Rutgers, he was involved in Demarest Hall, a creative writing, living-learning, residence hall, and in various student organizations. And there he was exposed to authors who would motivate him to become a writer: Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros. He worked his way through college by delivering pool tables, washing dishes, pumping gas, and working at Raritan River Steel. Reflecting on his experience growing up in America and working his way through college Díaz has said:

I can safely say I've seen the US from the bottom up...I may be a success story as an individual. But if you adjust the knob and just take it back one setting to the family unit, I would say my family tells a much more complicated story. It tells the story of two kids in prison. It tells the story of enormous poverty, of tremendous difficulty. 

After graduating from Rutgers he was employed at Rutgers University Press as an editorial assistant. Diaz was a Millet Writing Fellow at Wesleyan University, in 2009, and participated in Wesleyan's Distinguished Writers Series. He earned his MFA at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY.  At Cornell, he wrote most of his first collection of short stories. Currently, Díaz teaches creative writing at MIT and is also the fiction editor for the Boston Review. He is active in the Dominican American community and is a founding member of the Voices of Our Nations Arts Writing Workshop, which focuses on writers of color.

Work & Fellowships

His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker magazine, which listed him as one of the 20 top writers for the 21st century. He also has been published in Story, The Paris Review, and in the anthologies The Best American Short Stories four times (1996, 1997, 1999, 2000), The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories (2009), and African Voices. He is best known for his two major works: the short story collection Drown (1996) and the

novel  The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). Both were published to critical acclaim and he won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the latter.

Díaz has received a Eugene McDermott Award,  a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, a Lila Acheson Wallace Readers Digest Award,  the 2002 PEN/Malamud Award,  the 2003 USJapan Creative Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts

and Letters.  He was selected as one of the 39 most important Latin American writers under the age of 39 by the Bogota World Book Capital and the Hay Festival. In 2007, Miramax acquired the rights for afilm adaptation of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

About the Work

The stories in Drown focus on the teenage narrator's impoverished,  fatherless youth in the Dominican Republic and his struggle adapting to his new life in New Jersey. Reviews were generally strong.  The titles in the collection include Drown, Ysrael,  Fiesta, 1980,  Aurora, Boyfriend,  Edison, New Jersey,  How to Date a Browngirl,  Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie, No Face, and Negocios. The arrival of his novel,The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,  in 2007 prompted a noticeable re-appraisal of his earlier work. Drown became widely recognized as an important landmark in contemporary literature—ten years after its initial publication—even by critics who had either entirely ignored it or had given it poor reviews.

When the novel was published,  New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani characterized  his writing as a  a sort of streetwise brand of Spanglish that even the most monolingual reader can easily inhale: lots of flash words and razzle-dazzle  talk,  lots of body language on the sentences,  lots of David Foster Wallace-esque footnotes and asides. And he conjures with seemingly effortless aplomb the two worlds his characters inhabit: the Dominican Republic, that ghost-haunted motherland that shapes their nightmares and their dreams, and America (a.k.a. New Jersey), the land of freedom and hope and not-so-shiny possibilities that they’ve fled to as part of the great Dominican diaspora.  Writing for Time, critic Lev Grossman said that the Díaz novel was "so astoundingly great that in a fall crowded with heavyweights--Richard Russo, Philip Roth-- Díaz is a good bet to run away with the field. You could call The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao... the saga of an immigrant family, but that wouldn't really be fair. It's an immigrant-family saga for people who don't read immigrant-family sagas."

More Recognition

In addition to the Pulitzer, The Brief Wondrous life of Oscar Wao was awarded  the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Novel of 2007, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, the 2008 Dayton Literary Peace Price for Fiction, the 2008 Hurston-Wright Legacy Award,  and the Massachusetts Book Awards Fiction Award in 2007. Díaz also won the James Beard Foundation's MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award for his article He'll Take El Alto, which appeared in Gourmet, September, 2007.

The novel also was selected by Time and New York Magazine as the best novel of 2007. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Los Angeles Times, Village Voice, Christian Science Monitor, New Statesman, Washington Post, and Publishers Weekly were among the 35 publications that placed the novel on their Best of 2007 lists. The novel was the subject of a panel at the 2008 Modern Language Association conference in San Francisco.

In February, 2010, Díaz's contributions to encourage fellow writers was recognised with the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award.

On May 22, 2010, it was announced that Diaz had been selected to sit on the 20-member Pulitzer Prize board of jurors. Diaz described his appointment, and the fact that he is the first Latino to be appointed to the panel, as an "extraordinary honor.”

Public Postions

In February 2010, Diaz contributed a highly negative  critical assessment of the presidency of Barack Obama to The New Yorker writing in his essay One Year: Storyteller-in-Chief :

All year I’ve been waiting for Obama to flex his narrative muscles, to tell the story of hispresidency, of his Administration, to tell the story of where our country is going and why we should help deliver it there. A coherent, accessible, compelling story—one that is narrow enough to be held in our minds and hearts and that nevertheless is roomy enough for us, the audience, to weave our own predilections, dreams, fears, experiences into its fabric. It should necessarily be a story eight years in duration, a story that no matter what our personal politics are will excite us enough to go out and re‘lect the teller just so we can be there for the story’s end. But from where I sit our President has not even told a bad story; he, in my opinion, has told no story at all.

Activism & Advocacy

Díaz has been active in a number of community organizations in New York City, from Pro-Libertad, to the Dominican Workers' Party (Partido de los Trabajadores Dominicanos), and the Dominican Youth Union. He has been critical of immigration policy in the United States. With fellow author Edwidge Danticat, Díaz published an op-ed piece in The New York Times condemning the illegal deportation of Haitians and Haitian Dominicans by the Dominican government.