Junot Díaz was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey, where the family was abandoned by his father and subsequently lived in poverty. After working his way through Rutgers University, he later received an MFA from Cornell. He is the author of the celebrated story collection, Drown, and of a novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and numerous other honors. Díaz is the Nancy Allen professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Photograph by Lilly Oei.
WORKS THAT HAVE APPEARED IN NARRATIVE:
- Junot Díaz, an interview, in Spring 2009