Career Highlights

• He is a founding member of the Voices of Our Nations Arts Writing Workshop, a writing workshop focused on writers of color.
• He has been critical of immigration policy in the United States and with fellow author Edwidge Danticat published an op-ed piece in The New York Times condemning the illegal deportation of Haitians and Haitian Dominicans in the Dominican Republic.
• His short fiction has appeared in Bogotá Book Capital of World and the Hay Festival selected him as one of the 39 most important Latin American writers under the age of 39.
• In September 2007, Miramax acquired the rights for a film adaptation of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Career Overview

Junot Diaz is a Dominican-American writer and creative writing professor who immigrated to Parlin, New Jersey from the Dominican Republic when he was a child. Having always had a strong love for reading Diaz majored in English at Rutgers College. At Rutgers he was deeply involved in creative writing organizations and met many authors who would motivate him to become a writer. After graduating he earned his MFA from Cornell University where he wrote the majority of his first collection of short stories. Those short stories became 1996’s Drown, the critically acclaimed collection of tales about a teenager’s impoverished, fatherless youth in the Dominican Republic and his struggle adapting to his new life in New Jersey.

In 2007 Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was published. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao won many awards including the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Novel of 2007, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the 2008 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. The Washington Post and Time were among the 35 publications that placed the novel on their Best of 2007 lists. Diaz also serves as the fiction editor at the Boston Review and teaches creative writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is very involved in the Dominican community and is active in a number of community organizations in New York City.

Junot Diaz speaks with ThinkTalk host Erika Thomas about his love for the arts, and offers career advice to aspiring artists. Diaz also discusses the creative process involved in writing his books.