Junot Díaz Biography

Junot Díaz made his fame with the Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a 2007 family saga based on his own experiences growing up in New Jersey as an immigrant from the Dominican Republic. A graduate of Rutgers University (1992), Díaz earned a graduate degree in fine arts from Cornell in 1995 and published his first collection of stories, Drown, the next year. His debut novel, eleven years later, won the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and several other prizes. Díaz teaches writing at M.I.T. and is a frequent contributor to magazines such as The New Yorker and Paris Review. He’s also a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” and the author of the 2012 collection of stories, This Is How You Lose Her.