Junot Díaz

Junot Díaz was born on December 31, 1968, in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and immigrated to New Jersey with his family at the age of six, settling in Parlin, a working-class town in Middlesex County. His experience of growing up between two cultures — the Dominican world of his family and the American world of his schooling and daily life — became the essential subject of his fiction, rendered in a prose style that itself enacts this bilingual, bicultural tension. He attended Rutgers University, where he was the first member of his family to graduate from college, and earned an MFA in creative writing from Cornell University. His debut short story collection, Drown (1996), published when he was twenty-seven, was immediately recognized as a major literary arrival.

Drown‘s ten linked stories, told in a vernacular that weaves English and Spanish together with the naturalism of actual bilingual speech, portrayed the lives of Dominican immigrants in New Jersey and on the island with an honesty and intimacy that had not previously existed in American fiction. The collection announced not just a new writer but a new literary language, one that refused to choose between its two constituent cultures and instead found its power in the tension between them. Díaz spent eleven years writing his debut novel, working through multiple drafts and suffering through a period of severe creative block that he later discussed publicly with unusual candor.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, published in 2007, is one of the most celebrated American novels of the twenty-first century. It tells the story of Oscar de León, an overweight Dominican American science fiction fan from New Jersey who longs desperately for love but cannot find it, and weaves his story with his family’s history in the Dominican Republic under the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. The novel is narrated primarily by Yunior, a recurring character from Díaz’s earlier work, whose voice moves with vertiginous ease between street vernacular, academic discourse, comic book references, and lyrical Spanish. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2008.

Díaz’s prose style is one of the most distinctive in contemporary American literature: code-switching, maximally allusive, simultaneously comic and tragic, it demands and rewards active readership. He writes with the historical urgency of someone for whom the past is not safely concluded — the fukú, the curse that haunts his characters, is also the curse of colonialism and dictatorship on an entire people — and his narrative voice carries the weight of that history without being crushed by it.

Junot Díaz is a professor of writing at MIT and has been a prominent voice in discussions of diversity in publishing and the representation of Latino experience in American literature. His body of work, though relatively small, has had an outsized influence on contemporary fiction, demonstrating the possibilities of a literary language that takes seriously the full complexity of the immigrant and diasporic experience.