Junot Díaz

Biography

Junot Díaz was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, in 1968 and immigrated to New Jersey at age six. He grew up in Parlin, NJ, attended Rutgers University, and received an MFA from Cornell. Oscar Wao — begun in 1995, published in 2007 after twelve years of writing and abandonment — won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Díaz has described the novel as an attempt to write a history of the Trujillo dictatorship's effects on Dominican families in a form that young Dominican-Americans might actually read. He embedded the history in a love story and a nerd's biography precisely because he felt the academic histories were not reaching the people most affected.

Junot Díaz at a glance