From Wikipedia, edited Junot Díaz (born December 31, 1968) is a Dominican-American writer, creative writing professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and fiction editor at Boston Review. He also serves on the board of advisers for Freedom University, a volunteer organization in Georgia that provides post-secondary instruction to undocumented immigrants. Central to Díazs work is the immigrant experience. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, in 2008. He is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow. Díaz was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. 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. There he lived less than a mile from what he has described as one of the largest landfills in New Jersey. He attended Madison Park Elementary and was a voracious reader, often walking four miles in order to borrow books from his public library. At 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 (now merged to form Old Bridge High School) in Old Bridge Township, New Jersey in 1987, though he would not begin to write formally until years later, 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 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: I can safely say Ive seen the US from the bottom up...I may be a success story as an individual. But if you adjust the knob and just take it back one setting to the family unit, I would say my family tells a much more complicated story. It tells the story of two kids in prison. It tells the story of enormous poverty, of tremendous difficulty.” A pervasive theme in his short story collection Drown is the absence of a father, which reflects Diazs 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 countrys 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 he was employed at Rutgers University Press as an editorial assistant. At this time Diaz also first created the quasi-autobiographical character of Yunior in a story he 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. Yunior would become central to much of Diazs 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. He earned his MFA from Cornell University in 1995, where he wrote most of his first collection of short stories. Currently, Díaz teaches creative writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing and is also the fiction editor for Boston Review. He is active in the Dominican American community and is a founding member of the Voices of Our Nations Arts Writing Workshop, which focuses on writers of color. Díaz was a Millet Writing Fellow at Wesleyan University, in 2009, and participated in Wesleyans Distinguished Writers Series. Díaz is related to American journalist Nefertiti Jáquez, who currently works for NBC News in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He lives in a domestic partnership with paranormal romance writer Marjorie Liu. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker magazine, which listed him as one of the 20 top writers for the 21st century. He has been published in Story, The Paris Review, and in the anthologies The Best American Short Stories five times (1996, 1997, 1999, 2000, 2013), The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories (2009), 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 and he won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the latter. Diaz himself has described his writing style as [...] a disobedient child of New Jersey and the Dominican Republic if that can be possibly imagined with way too much education.” Díaz 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 was selected as one of the 39 most important Latin American writers under the age of 39 by the Bogotá World Book Capital and the Hay Festival. In September 2007, Miramax acquired the rights for a film adaptation of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The stories in Drown focus on the teenage narrators impoverished, fatherless youth in the Dominican Republic and his struggle adapting to his new life in New Jersey. Reviews were generally strong but not without complaints. Díaz read twice for PRIs This American Life: Edison, New Jersey in 1997 and How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie in 1998. Díaz also published a Spanish translation of Drown, entitled Negocios. The arrival of his novel (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) in 2007 prompted a noticeable re-appraisal of Díazs earlier work. Drown became widely recognized as an important landmark in contemporary literature—ten years after its initial publication—even by critics who had either entirely ignored the book or had given it poor reviews. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was published in September 2007. New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani characterized Díazs 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 theyve fled to as part of the great Dominican diaspora. Díaz said about the protagonist of the novel, Oscar was a composite of all the nerds that I grew up with who didnt have that special reservoir of masculine privilege. Oscar was who I would have been if it had not been for my father or my brother or my own willingness to fight or my own inability to fit into any category easily. He has said that he sees a meaningful and fitting connection between the science fiction and/or epic literary genres and the multi-faceted immigrant experience. Writing for Time, critic Lev Grossman said that Díazs 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... the saga of an immigrant family, but that wouldnt really be fair. Its an immigrant-family saga for people who dont read immigrant-family sagas.” In addition to the Pulitzer, The Brief Wondrous life of Oscar Wao was awarded the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Novel of 2007, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, the 2008 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Fiction, the 2008 Hurston-Wright Legacy Award, and the Massachusetts Book Awards Fiction Award in 2007. Díaz also won the James Beard Foundations MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award for his article Hell Take El Alto, which appeared in Gourmet, September 2007. The novel was also selected by Time and New York Magazine as the best novel of 2007. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Los Angeles Times, Village Voice, Christian Science Monitor, New Statesman, Washington Post, and Publishers Weekly were among the 35 publications that placed the novel on their Best of 2007 lists. The novel was the subject of a panel at the 2008 Modern Language Association conference in San Francisco. Stanford University dedicated a symposium to Junot Díaz in 2012, with roundtables of leading US Latino/a Studies scholars commenting on his creative writing and activism. In February 2010, Díazs contributions toward encouraging fellow writers were recognized when he was awarded the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, alongside Maxine Hong Kingston and poet M.L. Liebler. In September 2012, he released a collection of short stories entitled This Is How You Lose Her. The collection was named a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award on October 10, 2012. In his review of the book on online arts and culture journal Frontier Psychiatrist, Editor-In-Chief Keith Meatto wrote, While This is How You Lose Her will surely advance Diazs literary career, it may complicate his love life. For the reader, the collection raises the obvious question of what you would do if your lover cheated on you, and implies two no less challenging questions: How do you find love and how do you make it last? A description of the book is as follows: The stories in This Is How You Lose Her, by turns hilarious and devastating, raucous and tender, lay bare the infinite longing and inevitable weaknesses of our all-too-human hearts. They capture the heat of new passion, the recklessness with which we betray what we most treasure, and the torture we go through – the begging, the crawling over glass, the crying – to try to mend what weve broken beyond repair. They recall the echoes that intimacy leaves behind, even where we thought we did not care. They teach us the catechism of affections: that the faithlessness of the fathers is visited upon the children; that what we do unto our exes is inevitably done in turn unto us; and that loving thy neighbor as thyself is a commandment more safely honored on platonic than erotic terms. Most of all, these stories remind us that the habit of passion always triumphs over experience, and that love, when it hits us for real, has a half-life of forever.” In 2012, Diaz received a $500,000 (U.S.) MacArthur Genius grant award. Diaz is quoted as saying of his award win in the MIT News, I think I was speechless for two days, and that it was both stupendous and a mind-blowing honor.” Diaz is currently at work on his second long novel, a science-fiction epic temporarily called Monstro. Diaz has previously attempted to write a science fiction novel twice, with earlier efforts in the genre Shadow of the Adept, a far-future novel in the vein of Gene Wolfes The Shadow of the Torturer, and Dark America, an Akira-inspired post-apocalyptic nightmare remaining incomplete and unpublished. In an interview with New York Magazine prior to the release of This Is How You Lose Her, Diaz revealed that the work-in-progress novel concerns [...] a 14-year-old Dominican York girl who saves the planet from a full-blown apocalypse. but he has also warned that the novel may never be completed: Im only at the first part of the novel, so I havent really gotten down to the eating, he says, and Ive got to eat a couple cities before I think the thing will really get going.” With regard to his own writing, Diaz has said There are two types of writers: those who write for other writers, and those who write for readers,, and that he prefers to keep his readers in mind when writing, as theyll be more likely to gloss over his mistakes and act as willing participants in a story, rather than actively looking to criticize his writing. Díaz has been active in a number of community organizations in New York City, from Pro-Libertad, to the Communist Dominican Workers Party (Partido de los Trabajadores Dominicanos), and the Unión de Jóvenes Dominicanos (lit. Dominican Youth Union). He has been critical of immigration policy in the United States. With fellow author Edwidge Danticat, Díaz published an op-ed piece in The New York Times condemning the illegal deportation of Haitians and Haitian Dominicans by the Dominican government. After outwardly critiquing the revoking of citizenship for Haitian-Dominicans, Dominican officials lambasted the writer. The group questioned Diazs Dominican-ness in an open letter published by digital publication 7 Días. The letter, signed by writers including Eduardo Gautreau de Windt, Pura Emeterio Rondón and Efraim Castillo, accuses the Pulitzer Prize winner of not knowing the content and reach of the ruling, destined to organize the situation of immigrants and their descendants. The letter goes on to insult the Diaz, calling his interest in the country of his birth feigned, unnecessary and “offensive. On May 22, 2010, it was announced that Díaz had been selected to sit on the 20-member Pulitzer Prize board of jurors.Díaz described his appointment, and the fact that he is the first of Latin background to be appointed to the panel, as an extraordinary honor. He is currently the honorary chairman of the DREAM Project, a non-profit education involvement program in the Dominican Republic. “If you didnt grow up like I did then you dont know, and if you dont know its probably better you dont judge.” ― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Posted on: Wed, 31 Dec 2014 14:57:39 +0000
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