Junot Díaz

• Born: December 31, 1968
• Place of Birth: Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

DOMINICAN-BORN WRITER

Díaz’s literary production has made him one of the most prominent contemporary Latino writers. His work has garnered wide-ranging critical and commercial success, and his honors include the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 2008, an achievement accomplished by only one Latino writer before him.

Early Life

Junot Díaz (JEW-noh DEE-ahz) was born on December 31, 1968, in the Villa Juana neighborhood of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. When Díaz was six years old, his family moved to Parlin, New Jersey. His mother worked on an assembly line and cleaned homes; his father, who had been a military policeman in the Dominican Republic, drove a forklift in New Jersey. Díaz has described his father’s toughness and hypermasculinity as an important influence in his life and work. In interviews, Díaz has called his father a “trigamist” (referring to his father’s extramarital relationships) and a “Little League dictator.” Díaz was the third of his parents’ five children.

As a child, Díaz developed a love of literature, spending a good deal of time in public libraries, although he was also social and encouraged to prove his masculinity by becoming involved in activities such as fighting. After graduating from high school, Díaz attended Kean College (now Kean University) for a year before transferring to Rutgers University, where he honed his creative writing and earned his English degree in 1992. During his college years, Díaz worked various jobs, including at a steel mill and delivering pool tables. He returned to the Dominican Republic for the first time after immigrating at the age of twenty-two, and later he began to visit the country regularly.

Díaz worked for Rutgers University Press before going on to graduate school. He earned his master of fine arts degree in creative writing from Cornell University in 1995. During that time, he began to work on the short stories that would become part of his short story collection Drown, which was published in 1996.

Life’s Work

Drown is a collection of short stories unified by nine-year-old narrator Yunior. The stories are characterized by a gritty realism, lucid prose, striking immediacy, and electrifying language that includes both English and Spanish (the latter not differentiated by italics as in many other Latino texts), as well as a range of different registers and stylistic flourishes. Yunior has been described by Díaz as his alter ego and reappears in various incarnations in other short stories by Díaz and in his first novel. The stories are set in both the Dominican Republic and New Jersey and focuses on subjects including migration, poverty, family relationships, and adolescent struggles with belonging and emerging sexuality. Díaz’s work met with considerable success and garnered him mainstream recognition as well as a two-book contract with Riverhead Books.

Although Díaz published several short stories in magazines, primarily in The New Yorker, after the publication of Drown, eleven years elapsed before he published his next book. His first novel, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), became even more successful than Drown. Díaz began working on the novel while living in Mexico City in an apartment adjoining that of writer Francisco Goldman. At the time, Díaz was working on another novel, Akira, that he ultimately left unfinished.

The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao began as a short story, published in The New Yorker in 2000, containing many of the most important elements of the novel. The 2007 novel marked a stylistic shift from Díaz’s earlier work, embracing science fiction and fantasy and making extensive use of humor. The novel also demonstrates an intense focus on history. The central plot of the story focuses on Oscar, an obese Dominican “ghetto nerd” in New Jersey who is socially awkward but also a tragic hero. The narrator, Yunior, describes Oscar and his family, exploring connections between their lives and important elements of Dominican history.

Díaz's next collection, This Is How You Lose Her, was released in 2012. Díaz returns again to Yunior, who has grown up, and grapples with love, Dominican machismo, and the repercussions of his own serial infidelity. Like his previous work, these stories also delve into issues of family and cultural identity. The book was a best seller and a finalist for the National Book Award.

Continuing to contribute quality work to The New Yorker, Diaz published "The Silence: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma" (2018). He also published his first children's book Islandborn (2018). In 2020, Diaz contributed his work "Monstro" to the anthology of Latinx science fiction and fantasyLatinx Rising, edited by Matthew Goodwin.

Díaz has won numerous awards and fellowships for his literary work, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1999; the PEN/Malamud Award in 2002; the US-Japan Creative Artist Fellowship (National Endowment for the Arts) in 2002; the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship (Harvard University) in 2003; the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2007; the John Sargent, Sr., First Novel Prize in 2007; the James Beard Foundation M. F. K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award in 2008; the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Fiction in 2008; and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2008. Díaz was only the second Latino writer to win the Pulitzer in fiction; the first was Oscar Hijuelos in 1990. He was named one of the thirty-nine best Latin American writers under the age of thirty-nine by the Hay Festival Committee in Colombia. Díaz’s books have been translated into at least a dozen languages. The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was named one of the best books of 2007 by several publications, including Time and The New York Times. In 2012 he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant.

Díaz taught at Syracuse University in the late 1990s and joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2002, later becoming the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing. He was named distinguished fiction writer in residence with New York University’s Creative Writing Department in 2010. Other activities include his work as a founder and participant in the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, which holds summer workshops in San Francisco for developing writers of color; his work as fiction editor for The Boston Review; and his election to the Pulitzer Prize board in 2010.

In 2018, a female author publicly accused Díaz of forcefully kissing her while she was a graduate student at Columbia University. The allegations triggered additional claims by women that Díaz had bullied them. However, after several investigations, Díaz was cleared of wrongdoing by MIT and The Boston Review. He remained on staff at MIT into 2024, although he took a leave of absence in the fall of 2024.  

Significance

Díaz has produced two influential works of contemporary American literature, written in a unique voice that is rooted in the immigrant experience but resonates much more broadly. The author’s work has done a great deal to raise the profile of U.S. Latino literature, particularly since the publication of his popular novel The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, his Pulitzer Prize in 2008, and his 2012 MacArthur fellowship. He received an honorary doctorate from Brown University in 2013 and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2017. Díaz is one of only a handful of Latino writers to garner such widespread mainstream attention and success. He also has championed the work of other writers of color in his capacities as a writer, teacher, editor, and public figure.

Bibliography

"About - Junot Díaz." MIT Comparative Media Studies, cmsw.mit.edu/profile/junot-diaz. Accessed 3 Sept. 2024.

Alter, Alexandra. "Junot Díaz Cleared of Misconduct by M.I.T." The New York Times, 19 June 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/books/junot-diaz-cleared-of-misconduct-by-mit.html#:~:text=Last%20month%2C%20after%20the%20writer,student%2C%20the%20fallout%20was%20swift. Accessed 3 Sept. 2024.

Di Iorio Sandín, Lyn, and Richard Perez, eds. Contemporary U.S. Latino/a Literary Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Díaz, Junot. “Fiction Is the Poor Man’s Cinema: An Interview with Junot Díaz.” Interview by Diógenes Céspedes and Silvio Torres-Saillant. Callaloo, vol. 23, no. 3, 2000, pp. 892-907.

Danticat, Edwidge. “Junot Díaz by Edwidge Danticat.” Bomb Magazine, 1 Oct. 2007, bombmagazine.org/articles/junot-díaz.Accessed 3 Sept. 2024.

Barrios, Gregg. "Junot Díaz: My Stories Come from Trauma." Salon, 10 Oct. 2012, www.salon.com/2012/10/10/junot‗diaz‗my‗stories‗come‗from‗trauma. Accessed 3 Sept. 2024.