Junot Díaz

Junot Díaz
photographed 29 October 2007
Born	December 31, 1968 (1968-12-31) Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
Occupation	Novelist, professor
Nationality	Dominican
Period	1995-present
Influences Samuel R. Delany, Sandra Cisneros, Toni Morrison, Patrick Chamoiseau, Michael A. Martone
www.junotdiaz.com

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 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, in 2008.

Early years

Díaz was born in Villa Juana, a neighborhood in 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, New Jersey in December 1974, 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".

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) in Old Bridge Township, New Jersey in 1987. Though he would not begin to write formally until years later, Díaz was introduced to writing during this time in the form of composing twenty to thirty page letters to his brother, who was hospitalized with Leukemia for long stretches of their childhood.

He 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; 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. Reflecting on his experience growing up in America and working his way through college in 2010, Diaz 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. He earned his MFA from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York in 1995, where he wrote most of his first collection of short stories. Currently, Díaz teaches creative writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing 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. Diaz was a Millet Writing Fellow at Wesleyan University, in 2009, and participated in Wesleyan's Distinguished Writers Series.

Work

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 has also 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.

Diaz 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 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. In September 2007, Miramax acquired the rights for a film adaptation of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

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. The titles in the collection include "Ysrael", "Fiesta, 1980", "Aurora", "Drown", "Boyfriend", "Edison, New Jersey", "How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie", "No Face", and "Negocios". Diaz read twice for PRI's This American Life: "Edison, New Jersey" in 1997 and "How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, 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 Diaz'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.

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 also 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 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 was also 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, Diaz's contributions towards encouraging fellow writers were recognized when he was awarded the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, alongside Maxine Hong Kingston and poet M.L. Liebler. Also 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 his presidency, 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 reëlect 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. I heard him talk healthcare to death but while he was elaborating ideas his opponents were telling stories. Sure they were bad ones, full of distortions and outright lies, but at least they were talking to the American people in the correct idiom: that of narrative. The President gave us a raft of information about why healthcare would be a swell idea; the Republicans gave us death panels. Ideas are wonderful things, but unless they’re couched in a good story they can do nothing.

In February of 2012, it was announced that Diaz would be releasing a new collection of short stories entitled This is How You Lose Her, scheduled for a September release. A description of the book is as follows:

The stories in This Is How You Lose Her, by turns hilarious and devastating, raucous and tender, lay bare the infinite longing and inevitable weaknesses of our all-too-human hearts. They capture the heat of new passion, the recklessness with which we betray what we most treasure, and the torture we go through – “the begging, the crawling over glass, the crying” – to try to mend what we’ve broken beyond repair. They recall the echoes that intimacy leaves behind, even where we thought we did not care. They teach us the catechism of affections: that the faithlessness of the fathers is visited upon the children; that what we do unto our exes is inevitably done in turn unto us; and that loving thy neighbor as thyself is a commandment more safely honored on platonic than erotic terms. Most of all, these stories remind us that the habit of passion always triumphs over experience, and that “love, when it hits us for real, has a half-life of forever.”

Activism and 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 Unión de Jóvenes Dominicanos (lit. "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.

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".

Bibliography

Novels

• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead, 2007. ISBN 9781594489587

Short story collections

• Drown. New York: Riverhead, 1996. ISBN 1573220418
• This is How You Lose Her. New York: Riverhead, 2012.

Short stories

• "Ysrael" (Story, Autumn 1995)
• "How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie)" (The New Yorker, December 25, 1995)
• "Drown" (The New Yorker, January 29, 1996)
• "Fiesta 1980" (Story, Winter 1996)
• "The Sun, The Moon, The Stars" (The New Yorker, February 2, 1998)
• "Invierno" (Glimmer Train), 1998
• "Otravida, Otravez" (The New Yorker, June 21, 1999)
• "Flaca" (Story, Autumn 1999)
• "Nilda" (The New Yorker, October 4, 1999)
• "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" (The New Yorker, December 25, 2000)
• "Wildwood" (The New Yorker, June 11&18, 2007)
• "Alma" (The New Yorker, December 24, 2007)
• "The Pura Principle" (The New Yorker, March 22, 2010)
• "The Money" (The New Yorker, June 13, 2011)

Essays

• "Homecoming, with Turtle" (The New Yorker, June 14, 2004)
• "He'll Take El Alto" (Gourmet, September, 2007)
• "Summer Love, Overheated" (GQ, August, 2008)
• "One Year: Storyteller-in-Chief" (The New Yorker, February, 2010)
• "Apocalypse. What Disasters Reveal" (Boston Review, May/June, 2011)
• "Introduction" (A Princess of Mars, New York: Library of America, April 2012, ISBN: 978-1598531657)