Junot Díaz

Junot Díaz ( JOO-noh; born December 31, 1968) is a Dominican American writer, creative writing professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a former fiction editor at Boston Review. Central to Díaz's work is the immigrant experience, particularly the Latino immigrant experience. Born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Díaz migrated with his family to New Jersey when he was six years old. He 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. After obtaining his MFA from Cornell University, Díaz published his first book, the 1995 short story collection Drown. 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.