Junot Díaz facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Junot Díaz
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Díaz in 2012
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| Born | December 31, 1968 Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic |
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| Period | 1995–present |
| Notable awards | Guggenheim Fellowship (1999) National Book Critics Circle Award (2007) Pulitzer Prize (2008) MacArthur Fellowship (2012) Inducted into American Academy of Arts and Letters (2017) |
Junot Díaz (born December 31, 1968) is a Dominican American writer. He is also a creative writing professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He used to be a fiction editor at Boston Review.
Díaz also helps Freedom University. This is a group in Georgia that offers college-level classes. It helps immigrants who do not have official papers. A main idea in Díaz's writing is the experience of immigrants. He often writes about Latino immigrants.
Junot Díaz was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. His family moved to New Jersey when he was six years old. He earned a college degree from Rutgers University. After graduating, he created a character named "Yunior." This character became the narrator for many of his later books.
After getting his master's degree from Cornell University, Díaz published his first book. It was a collection of short stories called Drown in 1995. He won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. In 2012, he also received a special award called a MacArthur Fellowship, often called a "Genius Grant."
Contents
Junot Díaz's Early Life
Díaz was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. He was the third of seven children. For most of his early childhood, he lived with his mother and grandparents. His father was working in the United States. In December 1974, Junot moved to Parlin, New Jersey. There, he joined his father. He lived near what he called "one of the largest landfills in New Jersey."
Learning English and Reading
Díaz went to Madison Park Elementary. He loved to read a lot. He often walked four miles to borrow books from his public library. During this time, Díaz became very interested in stories about the end of the world. He especially liked films and books by John Christopher. He also enjoyed the original Planet of the Apes movies and the BBC mini-series Edge of Darkness.
Growing up, Díaz found it very hard to learn English. He said it "was a miserable experience." His other brothers and sisters seemed to learn the language quickly. His school noticed his struggles. His family was contacted, and he was placed in special education. This gave him more help and chances to learn English.
Díaz finished Cedar Ridge High School in 1987. This school is now called Old Bridge High School. He did not start writing seriously until many years later.
Junot Díaz's Writing Career
Díaz first went to Kean College in Union, New Jersey, for one year. Then he transferred and finished his college degree at Rutgers University-New Brunswick in 1992. He studied English there. He was part of Demarest Hall, a place for creative writing students. He also joined different student groups.
Finding Inspiration to Write
At Rutgers, he discovered authors who inspired him to become a writer. These writers included Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros. He worked many jobs to pay for college. He delivered pool tables, washed dishes, pumped gas, and worked at Raritan River Steel.
In 2010, Díaz talked about his experiences growing up in America. He said, "I can safely say I've seen the US from the bottom up." He added that while he might be a success, his family's story is more complex. He mentioned that his family faced "enormous poverty" and "tremendous difficulty."
The Character of Yunior
A common theme in his short story collection Drown (1996) is the absence of a father. This reflects Díaz's difficult relationship with his own father. He no longer talks to his father.
After graduating from Rutgers, Díaz worked as an assistant at Rutgers University Press. Around this time, he created the character of Yunior. Yunior is a character based partly on Díaz himself. Díaz used a story about Yunior for his application to his master's degree program. Yunior became very important in his later books. These include Drown and This Is How You Lose Her (2012). Díaz explained that his plan was to write many books about Yunior. He wanted them to form one large novel.
Díaz earned his master's degree in 1995 from Cornell University. He wrote most of his first collection of short stories there.
Teaching and Community Work
Díaz teaches creative writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He holds the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing position. He was also the fiction editor for Boston Review. He is very involved in the Dominican American community. He helped start the Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation. This group helps writers of color. In 2009, he was a Millet Writing Fellow at Wesleyan University. He also took part in Wesleyan's Distinguished Writers Series.
Junot Díaz's Personal Life
Díaz lives with paranormal romance writer Marjorie Liu. They are in a domestic partnership.
His Books and Stories
Díaz's short stories have been in The New Yorker magazine. The magazine even named him one of the top 20 writers for the 21st century. His work has also appeared in Story, The Paris Review, and Enkare Review. His stories have been chosen for The Best American Short Stories five times. He also won an O. Henry Prize in 2009.
His First Books: Drown
He is most famous for two main works. These are the short story collection Drown (1996) and the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). Both books were highly praised by critics. He won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Díaz has described his own writing style. He says it is like "a disobedient child of New Jersey and the Dominican Republic."
Díaz has received many awards and fellowships. These include a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He also received the 2002 PEN/Malamud Award. He was chosen as one of the 39 most important Latin American writers under 39. This was by the Bogotá World Book Capital and the Hay Festival.
The stories in Drown are about a teenage narrator. They show his poor, fatherless childhood in the Dominican Republic. They also show his struggles to get used to his new life in New Jersey. Reviews for Drown were mostly positive. Díaz also published a Spanish version of Drown, called Negocios. When his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao came out in 2007, people looked at Drown again. It became known as an important book in modern literature.
His Famous Novel: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was published in September 2007. A critic from New York Times, Michiko Kakutani, described Díaz's writing. She said it was a "streetwise brand of Spanglish." She noted that even people who only speak English could easily understand it. She said he creates the two worlds his characters live in very well. These are the Dominican Republic, their homeland, and America (New Jersey).
Díaz said that Oscar, the main character, was a mix of all the "nerds" he grew up with. He felt Oscar was who he might have been without his family's influence. He also sees a strong link between science fiction and the immigrant experience.
Lev Grossman, a critic for Time magazine, said Díaz's novel was "astoundingly great." He called it an "immigrant-family saga for people who don't read immigrant-family sagas." In September 2007, Miramax bought the rights to make a movie based on the book.
Awards for Oscar Wao
Besides the Pulitzer Prize, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao won many other awards. These include the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Novel of 2007. It also won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards and the 2008 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. The novel was chosen by Time and New York Magazine as the best novel of 2007. Many other publications also put it on their 'Best of 2007' lists.
In February 2010, Díaz was recognized for helping other writers. He received the Poets & Writers#Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award.
Later Works: This Is How You Lose Her and Islandborn
In September 2012, Díaz released another collection of short stories. It was called This Is How You Lose Her. This collection was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award.
One reviewer wrote that the stories in This Is How You Lose Her are funny and sad. They show the deep feelings and weaknesses of human hearts. They talk about new love and how people sometimes betray what they care about most. They also show the pain of trying to fix broken things.
In 2012, Díaz received a $500,000 MacArthur "Genius grant" award. He said he was "speechless for two days" and called it "stupendous."
After Oscar Wao, Díaz started working on a second novel. It was a science-fiction story with the working title Monstro. He had tried to write science fiction novels before. Part of why science fiction appeals to Díaz is that it deals with the idea of power. He said that other types of books didn't talk about power or dictatorships as much. He mentioned that these topics are always close in the Caribbean.
In an interview, Díaz said Monstro was about a 14-year-old "Dominican York" girl. She saves the planet from a big disaster. However, as of 2015, he said he was no longer writing that book.
Díaz's first children's book, Islandborn, came out on March 13, 2018. The story is about an Afro-Latina girl named Lola. She goes on a journey to remember her home country, the Dominican Republic.
Díaz has said there are two types of writers: those who write for other writers, and those who write for readers. He prefers to write for readers. He believes readers are more likely to enjoy the story and overlook small mistakes.
In January 2015, a poll of US critics named Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao as "the best novel of the 21st century to date." In February 2017, Díaz became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Standing Up for Others
Díaz has been active in many community groups in New York City. He has spoken out against immigration policy in the United States. With another author, Edwidge Danticat, Díaz wrote an article in The New York Times. They criticized the Dominican government for sending Haitians and Haitian Dominicans out of the country.
Because of Díaz's criticism, the Dominican Republic's Consul General in New York called him "anti-Dominican." They took back an award he had received from the Dominican Republic in 2009.
On May 22, 2010, Díaz was chosen to be on the 20-member Pulitzer Prize board of jurors. Díaz said his appointment was an "extraordinary honor." He was the first person of Latin background to be appointed to the panel.
As of September 2014, he is the honorary chairman of the DREAM Project. This is a non-profit education program in the Dominican Republic.
Awards and Honors
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
- 2007: Los Angeles Times Book Prize (Fiction) finalist for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
- 2007: National Book Critics Circle Award for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
- 2007: Salon Book Award for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
- 2008: Anisfield-Wolf Book Award (Fiction) for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
- 2008: Dayton Literary Peace Prize (Fiction) for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
- 2008: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
- 2009: International Dublin Literary Award shortlist for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
- 2012: Goodreads Choice Awards, Best Fiction, finalist, This Is How You Lose Her
- 2012: National Book Award, finalist, This Is How You Lose Her
- 2012: The Story Prize, finalist, This Is How You Lose Her
- 2013: Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction finalist (Fiction) for This Is How You Lose Her
- 2013: Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award longlist for This Is How You Lose Her
- 2013: Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award, winner, "Miss Lora" from This Is How You Lose Her
Other Literary Recognition
- 2012: Kansas City Star Top 100 Books, This Is How You Lose Her
- 2012: New York Times 100 Notable Books, This Is How You Lose Her
- 2012: Publishers Weekly Best Books, This Is How You Lose Her
See also
In Spanish: Junot Díaz para niños
- Dominican-Americans in Boston
- Latino literature
- Weird fiction
- American literature
- Caribbean literature
- Speculative fiction
