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Junot Díaz

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Junot Díaz
Junot Díaz.jpg}} \| Junot Diaz, October 29, 2007
Born	December 31 1968 (1968-12-31) (age 39) Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
Occupation	Novelist, short story writer
Nationality	American
Writing period	1995-present
Influences	John Christopher, Sandra Cisneros, Toni Morrison

Junot Díaz (born 31 December, 1968 in Santo Domingo) is a contemporary Dominican-American writer. He moved to the United States with his parents at age six, settling in New Jersey. Central to Díaz's work is the duality of the immigrant experience. He is the first Dominican-born man to become a major author in the United States.

1 Life
2 Work
3 Personal
4 Bibliography
5 References
6 See also
7 External links

Life

Díaz was born in Villa Juana, a barrio in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.^[1] He was the third child in a family of five. Throughout most of his early childhood he lived with his mother and grandparents while his father worked in the United States. Díaz immigrated to Parlin, New Jersey in December, 1974, where he was re-united with his father. He attended Madison Park Elementary and was a voracious reader, often walking four miles in order to borrow books from his public library. His father, Rafael, abandoned the family in the mid-80s; within months Diaz's oldest brother was diagnosed with leukemia and the family was plunged into a period of severe poverty. In this time Díaz became fascinated with apocalyptic films and books, especially the work of John Christopher, the original Planet of the Apes films and the BBC mini-series Edge of Darkness. Díaz graduated from Cedar Ridge High School in Old Bridge, New Jersey, in 1987. He attended Kean College in Union, New Jersey for one year before transferring and ultimately completing his BA at Rutgers College in 1992, majoring in English; there he was involved in a creative-writing living-learning residence hall and in various student organizations and was exposed to the authors who would motivate him into becoming a writer: Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros. He worked his way through college: delivering pool tables, washing dishes, pumping gas and working at Raritan River Steel. After graduating from Rutgers he was employed at Rutgers University Press as an editorial assistant. He earned his MFA from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York in 1995, where he wrote most of his first collection. Diaz has said he was stunned when he received an acceptance letter from Cornell because he had not applied there. Apparently his then-girlfriend applied on his behalf.^[2] Díaz is active in Dominican community and teaches creative writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is also the fiction editor for the Boston Review. He is a founding member of the Voices of Writing Workshop, a writing workshop focused on writers of colors.^[3]

Work

His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker magazine which listed him as one of the 20 top writers for the 21st century. He has also been published in Story, The Paris Review, and in the anthologies Best American Short Stories four times (1996, 1997, 1999, 2000), and African Voices. He is best known for his two major works: the short story collection Drown (1996) and the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). Both were published to critical acclaim. He has received a Eugene McDermott Award, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, a Lila Acheson Wallace Readers Digest Award, the 2002 Pen/Malamud Award, the 2003 US-Japan Creative Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He won the 2007 Sargant First Novel Prize and was selected as one of the 39 most important Latin American writers under the age of 39 by the Bogotá Book Capital of World and the Hay Festival. In September of 2007, Miramax acquired the rights for a film adaptation of The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. ^[4] The stories in Drown focus on the teenage narrator's impoverished, fatherless youth in the Dominican Republic and his struggle adapting to his new life in New Jersey. One critic has described the work as "thinly veiled autobiography".^[5] The titles in the collection include "Ysrael", "Fiesta, 1980", "Aurora", "Drown", "Boyfriend", "Edison, New Jersey", "How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie", "No Face", "Negocios". Diaz has read twice for PRI's This American Life: "How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie"^[6] in 1998, and "Edison, New Jersey"^[7] in 1997. Díaz has also published a Spanish translation of' Drown, entitled Negocios.

Díaz's first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was released in September 2007. (An excerpt from the novel had appeared previously in The New Yorker's 2007 Summer Fiction issue.) In an unusually favorable review, the New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani characterized Díaz's writing in the novel as

a sort of streetwise brand of Spanglish that even the most monolingual reader can easily inhale: lots of flash words and razzle-dazzle talk, lots of body language on the sentences, lots of David Foster Wallace-esque footnotes and asides. And he conjures with seemingly effortless aplomb the two worlds his characters inhabit: the Dominican Republic, the ghost-haunted motherland that shapes their nightmares and their dreams; and America (a.k.a. New Jersey), the land of freedom and hope and not-so-shiny possibilities that they’ve fled to as part of the great Dominican diaspora. ^[8]

Writing in Time magazine critic Lev Grossman said that Díaz's novel was

so astoundingly great that in a fall crowded with heavyweights--Richard Russo, Philip Roth--Díaz is a good bet to run away with the field. You could call The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead; 352 pages), out on Sept. 6, the saga of an immigrant family, but that wouldn't really be fair. It's an immigrant-family saga for people who don't read immigrant-family sagas. The family in question emigrated from the Dominican Republic and consists of a mother, a son and a daughter--the father having done a runner some years earlier. "Oscar was a social introvert who trembled with fear during gym class and who watched nerd British shows like Doctor Who and Blake's 7, could tell you the difference between a Veritech fighter and a Zentraedi walker, and he used a lot of huge-sounding nerd words like indefatigable and ubiquitous when talking to niggers who would barely graduate from high school." Oscar is fat and shy and--amazingly enough--doesn't have a lot of luck with the ladies. His sister Lola is slender and sexy and headstrong but in her own way almost as lost as Oscar. Their mother Beli is a domineering nightmare who brought along her own crushing load of psychic luggage when she fled Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, a paranoid serial rapist whose lengthy, stifling reign has cursed generations of Oscar's family. "He was our Sauron, our Arawn, our Darkseid, our Once and Future Dictator," Díaz writes, "a personaje so outlandish, so perverse, so dreadful that not even a sci-fi writer could have made his ass up." Díaz has written Oscar Wao (a mishearing of "Oscar Wilde") in a mongrel argot of his devising, a mixture of straight-up English, Dominican Spanish and hieratic nerdspeak crowded with references to Tolkien, DC Comics, role-playing games and classic science fiction. ("What more sci-fi than the Santo Domingo?" Oscar asks, "What more fantasy than the Antilles?") In lesser hands Oscar Wao would merely have been the saddest book of the year. With Díaz on the mike, it's also the funniest. As Oscar and Lola grow up and go to college, they find themselves fighting the lingering dooms of the old country, the alien demands of New Jersey and the depredations of their romantic hearts, all at the same time. It's an unwinnable three-front war, and the outcome isn't a fantasy; it's brutal reality. "You know exactly what kind of world we live in," Díaz writes. "It ain't no f___ing Middle-earth."^[9]

"The Brief Wondrous life of Oscar Wao" was awarded the Sargent First Novel Prize and was selected by Time^[10] and New York Magazine^[11] as the best novel of 2007. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Los Angeles Times, Village Voice, Christian Science Monitor, New Statesman, Washington Post and Publishers Weekly also placed the novel on their Best of 2007 lists. A poll by National Book Critics Circle ranked "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" as the most recommended novel by their members.^[12] About his own work and artistic outlook Diaz offered these insights:

Place was never something I took for granted, not when I had two geographies in my heart. I take special pleasure in naming things as well as I can, since all I was taught as a kid was to give things false names. Or to give them no name at all. I find these public/private discussions repressive whether they're being generated from within our community or without. How in the world can anyone form an authentic self when there are so many damn rules about how one should act in the world? Us writers, we're just throwing words up into the wind, hoping that they will carry, and someone, somewhere, sometime, will have a use for them.

^[13]

Personal

Junot Díaz and Nefertiti Jáquez, a news reporter at Philadelphia's WTXF-TV, FOX29, are first cousins.

Bibliography

Short stories:

"Ysrael" (Story, Autumn 1995)
"How To Date A Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie" (The New Yorker, December 25, 1995)
"Drown" (The New Yorker, January 29, 1996)
"Fiesta 1980" (Story, Winter 1996)
"The Sun, The Moon, The Stars" (The New Yorker, February 2, 1998)
"Otravida, Otravez" (The New Yorker, June, 21, 1999)
"Flaca" (Story, Autumn 1999)
"Nilda" (The New Yorker, October 4, 1999)
"The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" (The New Yorker, December 25, 2000)
"Homecoming, with Turtle" (The New Yorker, June 14, 2004)
"Wildwood" (The New Yorker, November 18, 2007)
"Alma" (The New Yorker, December 24, 2007)