Junot Díaz

Junot Díaz (; born December 31, 1968) is a Dominican-American writer, creative writing professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and was fiction editor at ''Boston Review''. He also serves on the board of advisers for Freedom University, a volunteer organization in Georgia that provides post-secondary instruction to undocumented immigrants. Central to Díaz's work is the immigrant experience, particularly the Latino immigrant experience.

Born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Díaz immigrated with his family to New Jersey when he was six years old. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Rutgers University, and shortly after graduating created the character "Yunior", who served as narrator of several of his later books. After obtaining his MFA from Cornell University, Díaz published his first book, the 1995 short story collection '' Drown''.

Diaz received the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel '' The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao'', and received a MacArthur Fellowship "Genius Grant" in 2012.

Early life

Díaz was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. He was the third child among seven siblings. Throughout most of his early childhood, he lived with his mother and grandparents while his father worked in the United States. In December 1974 he immigrated to Parlin, New Jersey, where he 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".

Díaz 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''. Growing up Diaz struggled greatly with learning the English language. He comments that it "was a miserable experience" for him, especially since it seemed that all of his other siblings "acquired the language in a matter of months; in some ways it felt overnight". As his school took notice Diaz's family was contacted and he soon was placed in special education to provide him with more resources and opportunities to learn the language.

Díaz graduated from Cedar Ridge High School in 1987 (now called Old Bridge High School) in Old Bridge Township, New Jersey, though he would not begin to write formally until years later.

Career

Díaz attended Kean College in Union, New Jersey, for one year before transferring and ultimately completing his BA at Rutgers University-New Brunswick in 1992, majoring in English; there he was involved in Demarest Hall, a creative-writing, living-learning, residence hall, and in various student organizations. He was exposed to the 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. During an interview conducted in 2010, Díaz reflected on his experience growing up in America and working his way through college:

A pervasive theme in his short story collection '' Drown'' (1996) is the absence of a father, which reflects Diaz's strained relationship with his own father, with whom he no longer keeps in contact. When Diaz once published an article in a Dominican newspaper condemning the country's treatment of Haitians, his father wrote a letter to the editor saying that the writer of the article should "go back home to Haiti".

After graduating from Rutgers, Díaz worked at Rutgers University Press as an editorial assistant. At this time he also first created the quasi-autobiographical character of Yunior in a story Díaz used as part of his application for his MFA program in the early 1990s. The character would become important to much of his later work including ''Drown'' and '' This Is How You Lose Her'' (2012). Yunior would become central to much of Diaz's work, Diaz later explaining how "My idea, ever since ''Drown'', was to write six or seven books about him that would form one big novel". Díaz earned his MFA from Cornell University in 1995, where he wrote most of his first collection of short stories.

Díaz teaches creative writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing and was the fiction editor for ''Boston Review''. He is active in the Dominican American community and is a founding member of the Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation, which focuses on writers of color. He was a Millet Writing Fellow at Wesleyan University, in 2009, and participated in Wesleyan's Distinguished Writers Series.

Personal life

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

Work

1994–2004: Early work and ''Drown''

Díaz's short fiction has appeared in ''The New Yorker'' magazine, which listed him as one of the 20 top writers for the 21st century. He has been published in '' Story'', ''The Paris Review'', ''Enkare Review'' and in the anthologies '' The Best American Short Stories'' five times (1996, 1997, 1999, 2000, 2013), 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. Diaz himself has described his writing style as "a disobedient child of New Jersey and the Dominican Republic if that can be possibly imagined with way too much education".

Díaz has received a ugene McDermottAward, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, a Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Writers Award, the 2002 PEN/Malamud Award, the 2003 US-Japan 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 Bogotá World Book Capital and the Hay Festival.

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 but not without complaints. Díaz read twice for PRI's ''This American Life'': "Edison, New Jersey" in 1997 and "How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie)" in 1998. Díaz also published a Spanish translation of' ''Drown'', entitled ''Negocios''. The arrival of his novel ('' The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao'') in 2007 prompted a noticeable re-appraisal of Díaz's 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 the book or had given it poor reviews.

2005–11: ''The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao''

'' The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao'' was published in September 2007. ''New York Times'' critic Michiko Kakutani characterized Díaz's writing in the novel as "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, the 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. Díaz said about the protagonist of the novel, "Oscar was a composite of all the nerds that I grew up with who didn't have that special reservoir of masculine privilege. Oscar was who I would have been if it had not been for my father or my brother or my own willingness to fight or my own inability to fit into any category easily." He has said that he sees a meaningful and fitting connection between the science fiction and/or epic literary genres and the multi-faceted immigrant experience.

Writing for ''Time'', critic Lev Grossman said that Díaz's 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." In September 2007, Miramax acquired the rights for a film adaptation of ''The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao''.

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