30 Facts About Junot Diaz

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

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

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.

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.

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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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".

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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".

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

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.

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.

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

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 .

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".

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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 .

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

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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".

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

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.

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

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