Díaz, Junot 1968-

PERSONAL:

Born 1968, in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; immigrated to the United States, 1975; naturalized citizen. Education: Rutgers University, B.A.; Cornell University, M.F.A.

ADDRESSES:

Home—New York, NY; Boston, MA. Office—Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02139.

CAREER:

Writer and educator. Freelance writer, 1996—. Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, member of creative writing faculty, 1997-2002; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, associate professor of writing, 2003—. Has also worked at a copy shop, and as a dishwasher, steelworker, pool-table delivery person, clerk, and editorial assistant.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Named one of the "New Faces of 1996," Newsweek magazine; Guggenheim Fellowship; Eugene McDermott Award and Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award; Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study fellowship, Harvard University; PEN/Malamud Award, 2002; U.S.-Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), 2003; Los Angeles Times Book Prize nomination, 2007, John Sargent, Sr., First Novel Prize, Mercantile Library Center for Fiction, 2007, National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, 2007, and Pulitzer Prize for fiction, 2008, all for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

WRITINGS:

Drown (stories), Riverhead Books (New York, NY), 1996.

(Editor) The Beacon Best of 2001: Great Writing by Women and Men of All Colors and Cultures, Beacon Books (Boston, MA), 2001.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (novel), Riverhead Books (New York, NY), 2007.

Stories from Drown were translated into Spanish and published as Negocios, Vintage Books (New York, NY), 1997.

Contributor to the anthology Best American Short Stories 1996; contributor of fiction to periodicals, including the New Yorker, Story, Paris Review, and African Verse. Has also written book reviews for Entertainment Weekly.

SIDELIGHTS:

Like the narrators of many of the short stories in his acclaimed first fiction collection Drown, Junot Díaz was born in the Dominican Republic and spent his early childhood in that country before his father was able to bring the family to the United States. But there the similarity ends. Many of Díaz's characters are adolescent drug dealers, while he himself obtained a literature and history degree from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and studied creative writing at Cornell University in New York, New York. Barbara Stewart, writing in the New York Times, called Díaz "an unflinching observer, an insider, of tough teen-age Latino immigrants in New Jersey. Of hand-to-mouth lives and of mind-numbing jobs. Of young men who get money making penny-ante drug sales and give some to their mothers to spend at the mall, or who steal from the boss's cash register to buy lingerie for a girlfriend. He writes of what he knows without compromise, but he invests his stories with love."

The title story in Drown concerns an adolescent narrator—a drug dealer—reacting to the knowledge that his best friend is gay. "Ysrael," set in the Dominican Republic, tells the tale of a boy whose face has been chewed off by a pig, and the taunting he suffers from his peers. The same character shows up in another story in Drown; by now he has come to America and is set to have reconstructive surgery. "Aguantando" describes the life of the most frequent narrator as a child in the Dominican Republic watching his mother try to support the family while they wait for his father to send for them. "Fiesta, 1980" takes place after the same narrator has been reunited with his father, and readers are shown his father's unsympathetic nature through his reaction to his son's chronic carsickness. One of the more controversial stories in Drown is "How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie."

Critical response to Drown was generally favorable. Rebecca Stuhr-Rommereim recommended the collection in Library Journal. Though she maintained that Díaz's writing was occasionally "somewhat strained," she asserted that "he provides convincing portraits." A reviewer for Publishers Weekly called Drown an "intense debut collection," and went on to observe that the tales in it possess "a lasting resonance." A Kirkus Reviews critic concluded: "Díaz's spare style and narrative poise make for some disturbing fiction, full of casual violence and indifferent morality. A debut calculated to raise some eyebrows."

Díaz later edited The Beacon Best of 2001: Great Writing by Women and Men of All Colors and Cultures, which Margaret Flanagan, in a review for Booklist, called an "exhilarating literary alternative [that] provides a necessary counterbalance" to more mainstream collections. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly dubbed it an "excellent collection."

In an interview for the Latino News Network Web site, Díaz described the experience of being catapulted into the literary limelight, as he was in the wake of Drown. "It was completely overwhelming," he told Michael O. Collazo. "I was not really mentally prepared for it. So instead of making mistakes—which meant … going nuts with the money or just going bananas and like changing who I was … what I did was shut down…. And I found it hard to write."

Having overcome some of his shock at early success, however, Díaz began taking stock of his place in the traditions of Latin American, African American, and specifically Dominican writers. "I feel like I have come from a long line of people," he explained, "and I'm just trying to do this idea that like, yo, we young people have insights. I'm not that young anymore, but like it takes a while to get a book done. When you're a new young writer, you need to say, ‘yo, this is the way the world is’ and hope to God that, in a few years, another young writer modifies it and says, ‘this is the way the world is.’"

Though Díaz appeared poised for greatness, the literary world would have to wait more than a decade for his next work, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, published in 2007. The weight of lofty expectations, a severe case of writer's block, and Díaz's meticulous writing style all contributed to the long delay. "You want to talk about a perfect storm," he told New York Magazine contributor Boris Kachka. "This was a perfect storm of insecurity and madness and pressure and you name it." Díaz also noted that the novel's complex and intricate plot required time to fully develop. In a Bomb interview with Edwidge Danticat, Díaz remarked: "Ultimately the novel wouldn't have it any other way. This book wanted x number of years out of my life. Perhaps I could have written a book in a shorter time but it wouldn't have been this book and this was the book I wanted to write."

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao examines the often violent history of the Dominican Republic through three generations of the Cabral family. The novel focuses on Oscar de León, a lovesick, overweight Dominican American youngster who dreams of becoming the next J.R.R. Tolkien, and Oscar's relationship with his domineering mother, Beli, who fled her native country after the death of its brutal dictator, Rafael Trujillo. According to Armando Celayo and David Shook, writing in World Literature Today, "[The Brief Wondrous Life of] Oscar Wao is more than a bildungsroman; it's an honest and poignant narrative that looks at the overbearing weight of history as it influences generations upon generations of Americans, who often don't realize the impact it has on them."

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao garnered strong reviews, particularly for Díaz's vibrant, energetic prose. New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani stated that the book "can only be described as Mario Vargas Llosa meets Star Trek meets David Foster Wallace meets Kanye West. It is funny, street-smart and keenly observed, and it unfolds from a comic portrait of a second-generation Dominican geek into a harrowing meditation on public and private history and the burdens of familial history." A.O. Scott, writing in the New York Times Book Review, described The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao as "a novel of assimilation, a fractured chronicle of the ambivalent, inexorable movement of the children of immigrants toward the American middle class, where the terrible, incredible stories of what parents and grandparents endured in the old country have become a genre in their own right."

Along with the critical accolades, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao garnered numerous honors, including the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The arduous journey to complete the novel, Díaz notes, was worth the reward. As he told Newsweek Online interviewer Jesse Ellison, "I think it was an incredibly difficult struggle. I tell a lot of young people I work with that nothing should be more inspirational than [me.] It took me 11 years to struggle through one dumb book, and every day you just want to give up. But you don't find out you're an artist because you do something really well. You find out you're an artist because when you fail you have something within you—strength or belief or just craziness—that picks you back up again."

Díaz is often referred to as a "Latino" or "Dominican" writer, and he says that such labels do not bother him. As he told Wajahat Ali in an interview for Counter-Punch Web site, "I think as a writer of color, as an artist of color, especially one who identifies himself or herself as such, and thinks there is nothing limiting or ghetto-izing of calling oneself a writer of color, simply stating that doesn't absolve me from universality, in fact I think it brings me closer to it. The universal is found in the specific."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Bomb, fall, 2007, Edwidge Danticat, "Junot Díaz."

Booklist, October 1, 2001, Margaret Flanagan, review of The Beacon Best of 2001: Great Writing by Women and Men of All Colors and Cultures, p. 293; July 1, 2007, Donna Seaman, review of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, p. 25.

Boston Globe, September 10, 2007, Johnny Díaz, "Eleven Years Later …: Call It a Curse or Writer's Block, but after the Acclaim of His First Novel, Junot Díaz Struggled to Write the Follow-up."

Catholic Library World, March, 1998, review of Drown, p. 56.

Entertainment Weekly, August 31, 2007, "Geek Drama," review of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, p. 70; September 21, 2007, Karen Valby, "Four Hot Authors for Fall," interview with Junot Díaz, p. 87.

Esquire, September, 2007, "We're All Fuku'd: So We May as Well Take a Cue from Junot Díaz: Embrace the Craziness, Order a Few Drinks, and Enjoy the Ride," review of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, p. 86.

Hindu (Chennai, India), May 4, 2008, Shelley Walia, "The Unlikely Romantic," review of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Hispanic, November, 2000, Ana Radelat, "Junot Díaz," p. 32; October, 2001, review of The Beacon Best of 2001, p. 18.

Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 1996, review of Drown, p. 916; July 15, 2007, review of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Library Journal, August, 1996, Rebecca Stuhr-Rommereim, review of Drown, p. 116.

New Statesman, February 25, 2008, Alice O'Keeffe, "Spanglish Surrealism," review of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, p. 58.

Newsweek, September 10, 2007, "From a Sunny Mordor to the Garden State: Junot Díaz's First Novel Is Worth All the Waiting," review of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, p. 51.

New York, September 16, 1996, review of Drown, p. 41.

New York Magazine, August 24, 2007, Boris Kachka, "Junot Díaz Karate-chops His Writer's Block: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Was Worth the Long, Long Wait."

New York Observer, September 11, 2007, Emily Bobrow, "A Decade after Drown, Is Junot Díaz's First Novel Worth the Wait?"

New York Times, September 15, 1996, Somini Sengupta, "More Orchard Beach than Elaine's," interview with Junot Díaz; December 8, 1996, Barbara Stewart, "Outsider with a Voice," interview with Junot Díaz; September 4, 2007, Michiko Kakutani, "Travails of an Outcast," review of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

New York Times Book Review, September 30, 2007, A.O. Scott, "Dreaming in Spanglish," review of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, p. 9.

People Weekly, September 17, 2007, Jonathan Durbin, review of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, p. 59.

Philadelphia Inquirer, September 12, 2007, Carlin Romano, "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: It's Hard Going, but Stay with It."

Publishers Weekly, July 8, 1996, review of Drown, p. 71; August 13, 2001, review of The Beacon Best of 2001, p. 297; June 18, 2007, Matthew Sharpe, review of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, p. 31.

San Francisco Chronicle, April 22, 2006, Edward Guthmann, "It's a Scary Time for Latin American Immigrants, and Writer Junot Díaz Feels the Pressure to Help."

Sunday Times (London, England), March 9, 2008, Adam Lively, review of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Tampa Tribune, October 14, 2007, Kevin Walker, "Writer Spins a ‘Wondrous’ Mishmash," review of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, p. 6.

Telegraph (London, England), September 3, 2008, Melissa Katsoulis, "Junot Díaz's Crash Course in Dominican Culture," review of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Time, September 3, 2007, Lev Grossman, "Fantastic Voyage," review of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, p. 62.

USA Today, September 11, 2007, Carol Memmott, "Oscar Wao Packs Punch of Erotic Latino Persuasion," p. 4D.

Vogue, September, 2007, Taylor Antrim, "The Wonder Years," review of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, p. 644.

Washington Post Book World, September 30, 2007, Jabari Asim, "It's a Wonderful Life: An Overweight ‘Ghetto Nerd’ Struggles to Find Love and a Place to Call Home," review of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, p. 3.

World Literature Today, March-April, 2008, Armando Celayo and David Shook, "In Darkness We Meet: A Conversation with Junot Díaz," p. 12, and Jim Hannan, review of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, p. 65.

ONLINE

Bookreporter.com,http://www.bookreporter.com/ (July 1, 2008), Sarah Rachel Egelman, review of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Bookslut,http://www.bookslut.com/ (September, 2007), John Zuarino, "An Interview with Junot Díaz."

Counterpunch,http://www.counterpunch.org/ (April 11, 2008), Wajahat Ali, "An Interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning Novelist Junot Díaz: Revenge of the Ghetto Nerd."

Every Writer's Resource.com,http://www.everywritersresource.com/ (July 1, 2008), Richard Edwards, "Interview with Junot Díaz."

LAist Web site,http://laist.com/ (April 10, 2008), Carrie Meathrell and Osmany Rodriguez, "LAist Interview: Junot Díaz, Author and Pulitzer Prize Winner."

Latino News Network,http://www.latnn.com/ (May 19, 2002), Michael O. Collazo, "Interview: Junot's Journey Has Just Started."

Metromix Los Angeles,http://losangeles.metromix.com/ (March 11, 2008), George Ducker, "Q & A: Junot Díaz: The Author on Immigration, Nerves and Being a ‘Hopeful Nerd.’"

Newsweek Online,http://www.newsweek.com/ (April 3, 2008), Jesse Ellison, "‘I'm Nobody or I'm a Nation’: Junot Díaz Talks about Authors and Ethnicity, the Universality of the Caribbean Experience and How Sweet It Was to Win the National Book Critics Circle Award (Even If He Wasn't There)."

Powells.com,http://www.powells.com/ (August 19, 2007), Dave Weich, "Junot Díaz out of the Silence," interview with Junot Díaz.

Salon,http://www.salonmagazine.com/ (May 19, 2002), review of Drown; (September 12, 2007), Roland Kelt, "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: Junot Díaz's Long-awaited Debut Novel Is a Portrait of the Artist as a Nerdy Young Latino—as Well as a Tribute to Tolkien, Magic Realism and Dominican History."

Slate,http://www.slate.com/ (November 8, 2007), Meghan O'Rourke, "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: Questions for Junot Díaz."

Splice Today,http://www.splicetoday.com/ (April 7, 2008), John Lingan, "Interview: Junot Díaz."