Díaz, Junot << DEE az, DZHOO noh >> (1968-…), is an American writer who was born in the Dominican Republic. His fiction explores the immigrant experience of Dominicans in the United States. Díaz has been praised for his distinctive use of language, which blends conventional Spanish and English with street slang and references to literature and popular culture.
Díaz won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). The novel traces the lives of three generations of a family living in both the Dominican Republic and the United States. The story explores the troubled history of the Dominican Republic, especially during the dictatorship of Raphael Trujillo from 1930 to 1961. Díaz examines the impact of that history both on people who lived in the country and those who left for the United States.
Díaz’s first book was Drown (1996), a collection of short stories about growing up in the Dominican Republic and New Jersey. A second collection, This Is How You Lose Her (2012), deals with family history and various kinds of love. These themes are often expressed from the viewpoint of a character named Yunior, who closely resembles the author. In the picture book Islandborn (2018), a little girl named Lola does not remember her birthplace in the Dominican Republic but learns about it from the memories of her family and friends.
Díaz was born on Dec. 31, 1968, in Santo Domingo. As a child, he lived with his mother and grandparents while his father worked in the United States. Díaz and his family joined his father in New Jersey in 1974. Díaz received a B.A. degree from Rutgers University in 1992 and an M.F.A. degree from Cornell University in 1995. Since 2003, he has taught writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
