30 Facts About Junot Diaz

1.

Junot Diaz serves on the board of advisers for Freedom University, a volunteer organization in Georgia that provides post-secondary instruction to undocumented immigrants.

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2.

Central to Junot Diaz's work is the immigrant experience, particularly the Latino immigrant experience.

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3.

Junot Diaz 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.

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4.

Junot 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.

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5.

Junot Diaz attended Madison Park Elementary and was a voracious reader, often walking four miles in order to borrow books from his public library.

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6.

Junot Diaz comments that it "was a miserable experience" for him, especially since it seemed that all of his other siblings "acquired the language in a matter of months; in some ways it felt overnight".

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7.

Junot Diaz graduated from Cedar Ridge High School in 1987 in Old Bridge Township, New Jersey, though he would not begin to write formally until years later.

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8.

Junot Diaz 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.

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9.

Junot Diaz was exposed to the authors who would motivate him to become a writer: Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros.

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10.

Junot Diaz worked his way through college by delivering pool tables, washing dishes, pumping gas, and working at Raritan River Steel.

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11.

Pervasive theme in his short story collection Drown is the absence of a father, which reflects Junot Diaz's strained relationship with his own father, with whom he no longer keeps in contact.

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12.

When Junot Diaz once published an article in a Dominican newspaper condemning the country's treatment of Haitians, his father wrote a letter to the editor saying that the writer of the article should "go back home to Haiti".

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13.

Junot Diaz earned his MFA from Cornell University in 1995, where he wrote most of his first collection of short stories.

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14.

Junot Diaz teaches creative writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing and was the fiction editor for Boston Review.

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15.

Junot Diaz is active in the Dominican American community and is a founding member of the Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation, which focuses on writers of color.

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16.

Junot Diaz was a Millet Writing Fellow at Wesleyan University, in 2009, and participated in Wesleyan's Distinguished Writers Series.

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17.

Junot Diaz is best known for his two major works: the short story collection Drown and the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao .

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18.

Junot Diaz himself has described his writing style as "a disobedient child of New Jersey and the Dominican Republic if that can be possibly imagined with way too much education".

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19.

Junot Diaz was selected as one of the 39 most important Latin American writers under the age of 39 by the Bogota World Book Capital and the Hay Festival.

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20.

Junot Diaz read twice for PRI's This American Life: "Edison, New Jersey" in 1997 and "How to Date a Brown Girl " in 1998.

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21.

Junot Diaz won the James Beard Foundation's MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award for his article "He'll Take El Alto", which appeared in Gourmet, September 2007.

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22.

Junot Diaz had previously attempted to write a science fiction novel twice prior to Oscar Wao, with earlier efforts in the genre "Shadow of the Adept, a far-future novel in the vein of Gene Wolfe's The Shadow of the Torturer, and Dark America, an Akira-inspired post-apocalyptic nightmare" remaining incomplete and unpublished.

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23.

In February 2017, Junot Diaz was formally inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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24.

Junot Diaz has been active in a number of community organizations in New York City, from Pro-Libertad, to the Communist Dominican Workers' Party, and the Union de Jovenes Dominicanos .

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25.

Junot Diaz has been critical of immigration policy in the United States.

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26.

Junot Diaz described his appointment, and the fact that he is the first of Latin background to be appointed to the panel, as an "extraordinary honor".

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27.

In May 2018, the author Zinzi Clemmons publicly confronted Junot Diaz, alleging that he had once forcibly cornered and kissed her.

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28.

Junot Diaz addressed the essay to a reader who had once asked him if he had been abused, writing that the childhood abuse he experienced led him to hurt others in later life.

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29.

MIT, where Junot Diaz teaches creative writing, later announced that their investigation had not revealed any evidence of wrongdoing.

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30.

Junot Diaz voluntarily resigned as chair of the Pulitzer Prize board soon after the allegations were made public.

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