Junot Diaz Bio
Junot Diaz was born in the Dominican Republic and raised New Jersey. He is a creative writing teacher at MIT and fiction editor at the Boston Review. He also serves on the board of advisers for the Freedom University, a Volunteer organization in Georgia that provides post-secondary instruction to undocumented immigrants. From what I have read I have gathered that he really had to rely on himself. Getting him through college working the jobs where you have to do the dirty work, dishes, and pumping-gas. Supposedly Drown reflects Diaz’s strained relationship with his own father, with whom he no longer keeps in contact with. Diaz was born in Villa Juana, a neighborhood in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. He was the third child in a family of five. Through most of his childhood he lived with his mother and grandparents while his father worked in the United States. Diaz emigrated to Parlin, New Jersey, in December of 1974, where he was able to reunite with his father. He lived close to what he considered one of the largest landfills in New Jersey.
His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker magazine, which listed him as one of the 20 top writers for the 21st century.[16] 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), The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories (2009), 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 himself has described his writing style as "[...] a disobedient child of New Jersey and the Dominican Republic if that can be possibly imagined with way too much education."[17]
Díaz has received a Eugene McDermott Award, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, a Lila Acheson Wallace Readers Digest Award, the 2002
His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker magazine, which listed him as one of the 20 top writers for the 21st century.[16] 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), The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories (2009), 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 himself has described his writing style as "[...] a disobedient child of New Jersey and the Dominican Republic if that can be possibly imagined with way too much education."[17]
Díaz has received a Eugene McDermott Award, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, a Lila Acheson Wallace Readers Digest Award, the 2002