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Junot Díaz (born 31 December 1968) is a Dominican-American writer and creative writing professor at MIT. Central to Díaz's work is the duality of the immigrant experience. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in 2008.
[edit] Biography[edit] Early yearsDíaz was born in Villa Juana, a neighborhood in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.[1] 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, Rafael, worked in the United States. Díaz emigrated to Parlin, New Jersey in December 1974, where he was re-united with his father. He lived in the London Terrace Apartments, less than a mile from what he has described as "one of the largest landfills in New Jersey."[2] He attended Madison Park Elementary [2] 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.[3] 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 a creative-writing living-learning residence hall and in various student organizations and was exposed to the authors who would motivate him into becoming 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. 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. Díaz is active in the Dominican community and teaches creative writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is also the fiction editor for the Boston Review. He is a founding member of the Voices of Our Nations Arts Writing Workshop, a writing workshop focused on writers of color. He was a Writing Fellow at Wesleyan University, in 2009, and participated in Wesleyan's Distinguished Writers Series.[4] [edit] WorkHis 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) 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 Book Capital of World and the Hay Festival http://www.hayfestival.com/bogota/eng-authors.aspx In September 2007, Miramax acquired the rights for a film adaptation of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.[5] 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.[6] 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", "Negocios". Diaz read twice for PRI's This American Life: "Edison, New Jersey"[7] in 1997 and "How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie"[8] 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[9] or had given it poor reviews.[10] Díaz's first novel, 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:
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."[11] In addition to the Pulitzer, The Brief Wondrous life of Oscar Wao was awarded the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize[12], the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Novel of 2007 [13], the Anisfield-Wolf Award [14], the 2008 Dayton Literary Peace Price for Fiction [15], the 2008 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the 2008 Massachusetts Book Prize for Best Fiction [16]. Díaz also won the James Beard Foundation's M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award for his article “He’ll Take El Alto,” which appeared in Gourmet, September 2007 [17]. The novel was also selected by Time[18] and New York Magazine[19] as the best novel of 2007. 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.[20] [edit] Activism and advocacyDíaz has been active in a number of community organizations in New York City, from Pro-Libertad, to the Dominican Workers Party (Partido Trabajador Dominicano) and the Unión de Jóvenes Dominicanos. He has been critical of immigration policy in the United States[21] and with fellow author Edwidge Danticat published an op-ed piece in The New York Times condemning the illegal deportation of Haitians and Haitian Dominicans in the Dominican Republic.[22] [edit] Bibliography
[edit] References
[edit] Further reading
[edit] External links
Categories: 1968 births | Living people | Americans of Dominican Republic descent | Cornell University alumni | Dominican Republic writers | Hispanic American writers | Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty | People from Middlesex County, New Jersey | Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winners | Rutgers University alumni | |||||||||||||||||||||
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