朱诺·迪亚斯

Junot Díaz ( JOO-noh; born December 31, 1968) is a Dominican American writer, creative writing professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a former fiction editor at Boston Review. Central to Díaz's work is the immigrant experience, particularly the Latino immigrant experience.

Born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Díaz migrated with his family to New Jersey when he was six years old. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Rutgers University, and shortly after graduating created the character "Yunior", who served as narrator of several of his later books. After obtaining his MFA from Cornell University, Díaz published his first book, the 1995 short story collection Drown.

Diaz received the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and received a MacArthur Fellowship "Genius Grant" in 2012.

Early life

Díaz was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic on December 31, 1968, to Rafael and Virtudes Díaz. He was the third child among seven siblings. Throughout most of his early childhood, he lived with his mother and grandparents while his father worked in the United States. In December 1974 he migrated to Parlin, New Jersey, where he was re-united with his father. There he lived less than a mile from what he has described as "one of the largest landfills in New Jersey".

Career

Díaz attended Kean College in Union, New Jersey, for one year before transferring and ultimately completing his BA at Rutgers University-New Brunswick in 1992, majoring in English; there he was involved in Demarest Hall, a creative-writing, living-learning, residence hall, and in various student organizations. He was exposed to the authors who would motivate him to become a writer: Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros.……

Personal life

Díaz lives in a domestic partnership with paranormal romance writer Marjorie Liu in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Work

1994–2004: Early work and Drown

Díaz's short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker magazine, which listed him as one of the 20 top writers for the 21st century. He has been published in Story, The Paris Review, Enkare Review and in the anthologies The Best American Short Stories five times (1996, 1997, 1999, 2000, 2013), 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).……

2005–11: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was published in September 2007.……

Activism and advocacy

Díaz has been active in a number of community organizations in New York City, from Pro-Libertad, to the Communist Dominican Workers' Party (Partido de los Trabajadores Dominicanos), and the Unión de Jóvenes Dominicanos ("Dominican Youth Union"). He has been critical of immigration policy in the United States. With fellow author Edwidge Danticat, Díaz published an op-ed piece in The New York Times condemning the Dominican government's deportation of Haitians and Haitian Dominicans.

Allegations of abusive behavior

In May 2018, the author Zinzi Clemmons publicly confronted Díaz, alleging that he had once forcibly cornered and kissed her. Other women, including the writers Carmen Maria Machado and Monica Byrne, responded on Twitter with their own accounts of "belittling" and condescension by Díaz. The author Alisa Valdes wrote a blog post alleging "misogynistic abuse" on the part of Díaz some years prior;……

Awards and nominations

Honors

• 2002: PEN/Malamud Award
• 2008: Fellow of the American Academy Rome Prize

2011: The Nicolas Guillen Philosophical Literature Prize, Caribbean Philosophical Association

2012: MacArthur Fellowship

2013: Honorary Doctorate (Doctor of Letters), Brown University

2013: Norman Mailer Prize (Distinguished Writing)

2017: Inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters

Awards

2007: Center for Fiction First Novel Prize for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Other lit distinctions

2012: Kansas City Star Top 100 Books, This Is How You Lose Her