Junot Diaz

Author Junot Diaz is lauded for his eclectic wordplay and street smart expressiveness in his fiction, which draws heavily from his experiences as a Dominican immigrant. The wide acclaim for his 1996 debut, the short story collection Drown, made him the premier Dominican writer in the U.S. His follow-up novel in 2007, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, won the Pulitzer Prize. In 2012 after publishing his third book, This Is How You Lose Her, he was named a MacArthur Foundation fellow. He is currently the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at MIT. Updated 2013