Junot Díaz

At 55 years old, Junot Díaz physical status not available right now. We will update Junot Díaz's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Díaz attended Kean College in Union, New Jersey, for one year before transferring and ultimately completing his BA at Rutgers University-New Brunswick in 1992, majoring in English; there he was involved in Demarest Hall, a creative-writing, living-learning, residence hall, and in various student organizations. He was exposed to the authors who would motivate him to become a writer: Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros. He worked his way through college by delivering pool tables, washing dishes, pumping gas, and working at Raritan River Steel. During an interview conducted in 2010, Díaz reflected on his experience growing up in America and working his way through college:

A pervasive theme in his short story collection Drown (1996) is the absence of a father, which reflects Diaz's strained relationship with his own father, with whom he no longer keeps in contact. When Diaz once published an article in a Dominican newspaper condemning the country's treatment of Haitians, his father wrote a letter to the editor saying that the writer of the article should "go back home to Haiti".

After graduating from Rutgers, Díaz worked at Rutgers University Press as an editorial assistant. At this time he also first created the quasi-autobiographical character of Yunior in a story Díaz used as part of his application for his MFA program in the early 1990s. The character would become important to much of his later work including Drown and This Is How You Lose Her (2012). Yunior would become central to much of Diaz's work, Diaz later explaining how "My idea, ever since Drown, was to write six or seven books about him that would form one big novel". Díaz earned his MFA from Cornell University in 1995, where he wrote most of his first collection of short stories.

Díaz teaches creative writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing and was the fiction editor for Boston Review. He is active in the Dominican American community and is a founding member of the Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation, which focuses on writers of color. He was a Millet Writing Fellow at Wesleyan University, in 2009, and participated in Wesleyan's Distinguished Writers Series.

Source

• 2002: PEN/Malamud Award
• 2008: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
• 2007: Salon Book Award for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
• 2007: National Book Critics Circle Award for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
• 2007: Center for Fiction First Novel Prize for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
• 2007: Los Angeles Times Book Prize (Fiction) finalist for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
• 2008: Fellow of the American Academy Rome Prize
• 2008: Dayton Literary Peace Prize (Fiction) for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
• 2008: Anisfield-Wolf Book Award (Fiction) for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
• 2009: International Dublin Literary Award shortlist for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
• 2011: The Nicolas Guillen Philosophical Literature Prize, Caribbean Philosophical Association
• 2012: MacArthur Fellowship
• 2012: National Book Award, finalist, This is How You Lose Her
• 2012: Publishers Weekly Best Books, This is How You Lose Her
• 2012: Kansas City Star Top 100 Books, This is How You Lose Her
• 2012: New York Times 100 Notable Books, This Is How You Lose Her
• 2012: Goodreads Choice Awards, Best Fiction, finalist, This is How You Lose Her
• 2012: Story Prize, finalist
• 2013: Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award, winner, "Miss Lora" from This is How You Lose Her
• 2013: Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award longlist for This is How You Lose Her
• 2013: Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction finalist (Fiction) for This is How You Lose Her
• 2013: Honorary Doctorate (Doctor of Letters), Brown University
• 2013: Norman Mailer Prize (Distinguished Writing)
• 2017: Inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters