Junot Díaz

Dominican-American · born 1968

Born on December 31, 1968, in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic, the third of seven children of Rafael Díaz, a New York Police Department officer working ahead of his family in the United States, and Virtudes Díaz, Junot Díaz spent his first six years in the care of his mother and grandparents before the family was reunited in Parlin, New Jersey, in December 1974. They lived less than a mile from one of the largest landfills in the state. He learned English in special-education classes, walked four miles to the public library, and read voraciously, especially apocalyptic science fiction and the original Planet of the Apes. He earned his bachelor's degree from Rutgers in 1992, working his way through college by delivering pool tables, washing dishes, and pumping gas, and took his MFA from Cornell in 1995, the year his first collection of stories, Drown, was published. The narrator Yunior, the half-autobiographical Dominican kid from New Jersey, would carry through almost all his later fiction. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, eleven years in the writing, appeared in 2007, fusing the immigrant family novel with Caribbean history, comic-book footnotes, fukú, and a chorus of Spanglish voices. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2007 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2008. A MacArthur Fellowship followed in 2012. The story collection This Is How You Lose Her appeared the same year. He teaches creative writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing and was formerly fiction editor at Boston Review. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with the novelist Marjorie Liu.