Junot Díaz is an American novelist born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. He is the recipient of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for his novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The novel has quickly become standard reading in university courses on the contemporary novel, Latino literature, and gender studies. One of the first novels written in "Spanglish" to enjoy widespread popular and critical acclaim, it has won countless awards and has quickly taken its place among significant American novels.
Díaz holds a B.A. from Rutgers University and an M.F.A. from Cornell University. He is at present the Rudge and Nance Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and fiction editor at the Boston Review. In addition, he has taken his place among public intellectuals as a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine. In 2010, he was appointed the first ever Latino author to sit on the 20-member board of jurors for the Pulitzer Prize.
He 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 is the co-founder of Voices of Our Nation Workshop.
This event is co-sponsored by the Department of English, Project Narrative, DISCO, LASER, and the Multicultural Center.
