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'Junot Díaz' is a contemporary Dominican-American writer. He moved to the United States with his parents at age six, settling in New Jersey. Central to Díaz's work is the duality of the immigrant experience. He is the first Dominican-born man to become a major author in the United States.
His fiction has appeared in ''The New Yorker'' magazine which listed him as one of the 20 top writers for the 21st century. He has also been published in ''Story'', ''The Paris Review'', and in the anthologies ''Best American Short Stories'', and ''African Voices''. He is best known for his two major works: the short story collection ''Drown'' (1996) and the novel ''Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao'' (2007). Both were published to critical acclaim. [1]
The stories in ''Drown'' focus on the teenage narrator's impoverished, fatherless youth in the Dominican Republic and his struggle adapting to his new life in New Jersey. One critic has described the work as "thinly veiled autobiography" [2].The titles in the collection include "Ysrael", "Fiesta, 1980", "Aurora", "Drown", "Boyfriend", "Edison, New Jersey", "How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie", "No Face", "Negocios". Diaz has read twice for NPR's This American Life: "How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie"[3] in 1998, and "Edison, New Jersey"[4] in 1997. Díaz has also published a Spanish translation of' ''Drown'', entitled ''Negocios''.
Díaz's first novel, ''The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,'' was released in September 2007. ( An excerpt from the novel had appeared previously in the ''New Yorker'' in the 1990s.) In an unusually favorable review, The NYTimes critic Michiko Kakutani characterized Díaz's writing in the novel as

a sort of streetwise brand of Spanglish that even the most monolingual reader can easily inhale: lots of flash words and razzle-dazzle talk, lots of body language on the sentences, lots of David Foster Wallace-esque footnotes and asides. And he conjures with seemingly effortless aplomb the two worlds his characters inhabit: the Dominican Republic, the ghost-haunted motherland that shapes their nightmares and their dreams; and America (a k a New Jersey), the land of freedom and hope and not-so-shiny possibilities that they’ve fled to as part of the great Dominican diaspora. [5]

Speaking about his artistic intentionality, Díaz has said "I'm one of those people who not only want to tell a story, I also want to break the rules. People tell you, 'You can't write a political story' [and] 'I don't write politics.' You've heard that from writers? Well, that's totally not me. I have an agenda to write politics without letting the reader think it is political. That's my game plan for every story'" (Cespedes et al. 901).
Díaz graduated from Cedar Ridge High School in Old Bridge, New Jersey, in 1987. He then went on to complete his BA at Rutgers College in 1992, majoring in English; there he was involved in a creative-writing living-learning residence hall. He earned his MFA from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York in 1995. Diaz has said he was stunned when he received an acceptance letter from Cornell because he had not applied there. Apparently his then-girlfriend applied on his behalf (Cespedes et al. 898).
Díaz currently teaches creative writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is fiction editor for Boston Review.
Junot Díaz and Nefertiti Jaquez, who most recently was a news reporter at WFOR-TV, CBS4, are first cousins.

Contents

Bibliography

References

External links

Bibliography

★ ''Drown'' (Riverhead, New York, NY, 1997. ISBN 1573220418)

★ ''Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao'' (Riverhead, New York, NY, 2007. ISBN 9781594489587)

References

Kakutani, Michiko. Rev. of Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz. New York Times. 4 Sep. 2007. 4 Sep. 2007 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/04/books/04diaz.html?ex=1189483200&en=8689692aaea0f735&ei=5070
Cespedes, Diogenes, Silvio Torres-Saillant, and Junot Diaz. "Fiction is the Poor Man's Cinema: An Interview with Junot Diaz." Callaloo 23.3, Dominican Republic Literature and Culture (2000): 892-907.
Cheuse, Alan. Rev. of Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz. All Things Considered. 28 Aug 2007. 4 Sep 2007 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14004835

External links

★ Junot Diaz on the Charlie Rose show

★ NYTimes review of ''Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao''

★ Díaz on ''This American Life''

★ ''Daily Collegian'' (PSU) interview with Díaz