Junot Díaz

Junot Díaz was born and raised in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic. His work has appeared in: The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Time Out, Glimmer Train, Story, African Voices, Best American Fiction `96 (ed. John Edgar Wideman); Best American Fiction `97 (ed. Annie Proulx); Best American Fiction `99 (ed. Amy Tan); Best American Fiction `00 (ed. E.L. Doctorow) and The O. Henry Prize Stories anthology, 2009; Díaz was included in the ‘20 Writers for the 21st Century’ issue of The New Yorker (June ‘99). He received a Pushcart Prize XXII, for his story ‘Invierno” which was later also selected for The Pushcart Book of Short Stories, a compilation of the best fiction from the first 25 years of the Pushcart Prize. Díaz edited The Beacon Best of 2001: Great Writing by Women and Men of All Colors and Cultures. He co-wrote the screenplay for Washington Heights directed by Alfredo de Villa. He is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Díaz’s story collection, Drown, was published by Riverhead in `96 (pbk, July `97), it is in its 23rd printing and was sold in 15 countries. (The story collection was also published in Spanish in the US, by Vintage Español, under the title Negocios.) His first novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (September 2007, Riverhead) won the Pulitzer Prize and remained on the New York Times and independent bookstore bestseller lists for two years – in hardback and paperback. It has been sold in 33 languages and film rights have been optioned by Scott Rudin and Miramax.