Junot Díaz

Junot Díaz
Junot Díaz, 2012
Born	(1968-12-31) December 31, 1968 (age 48) Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
Occupation	Novelist, professor, writer
Nationality	American, Dominican
Period	1997-present
Website
junotdiaz.com

Junot Díaz (born December 31, 1968) is a Dominican American writer, creative writing professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and 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. He received the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. He is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow.

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. In 2007, he published his first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, followed in 2012 by a second short story collection, This Is How You Lose Her. Since 2007, Diaz was reported to be working on another novel, entitled Monstro; however, in June 2015 Diaz stated that he had effectively abandoned that novel.

Díaz was born 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 immigrated 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".