Junot Díaz (born 31 December 1968) is a Dominican-American writer and creative writing professor at MIT. Central to Díaz's work is the duality of the immigrant experience. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in 2008.
Díaz was born in Villa Juana, a neighborhood in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. He was the third child in a family of five. Throughout most of his early childhood, he live...
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Junot Díaz (born 31 December 1968) is a Dominican-American writer and creative writing professor at MIT. Central to Díaz's work is the duality of the immigrant experience. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in 2008.
Díaz was born in Villa Juana, a neighborhood 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, Rafael, worked in the United States. Díaz emigrated to Parlin, New Jersey in December 1974, where he was re-united with his father. He lived in the London Terrace Apartments, 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...
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