Junot Díaz

Junot Díaz is a Dominican-American novelist and creative writing professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His short story collection This Is How You Lose Her (2012) became a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist.

Junot Díaz was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. Díaz spent a year at Kean College in Union, New Jersey, before transferring to Rutgers University-New Brunswick, where he ultimately earned his BA degree in 1992. He pursued English as his major and actively participated in Demarest Hall, a residence hall that fostered creative writing and a living-learning community.

Additionally, he engaged in several student organizations during his time at Rutgers. During this period, he discovered authors who inspired him to pursue a writing career, Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros.

To support himself financially during college, Díaz has taken on various jobs such as delivering pool tables, washing dishes, pumping gas, and working at Raritan River Steel.

Díaz's short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker magazine, Story, The Paris Review, Enkare Review, and the anthologies The Best American Short Stories five times. He was also a fiction editor at Boston Review.

His first published book, the collection Drown (1996), received critical acclaim.

In 2007, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao came out. It received praise for Junot Díaz's unique writing style characterized by streetwise Spanglish and engaging footnotes.

The novel explores the dual worlds of the Dominican Republic and the Dominican diaspora in America, particularly New Jersey. Díaz revealed that the protagonist, Oscar, reflects the experiences of nerds without conventional masculine privileges. The novel garnered numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Novel in 2007. It was also slated for a film adaptation.

In 2012, Díaz released a collection of short stories This Is How You Lose Her. The text was named a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award.

In 2018, he debuted with a children's book, Islandborn. With illustrations by Leo Espinosa, the picture book features Dominican girls living in the Bronx, much like Díaz's goddaughters to whom he had long promised a children's book.

Now Díaz is the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Junot Díaz lives in a domestic partnership with paranormal romance writer Marjorie Liu.

Photo credit: www.junotdiaz.com