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Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
How to pronounce Junot Diaz: JOO-no DEE-as
A graduate of Rutgers College, Junot Diaz is the author of Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao which won the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, African Voices, Best American Short Stories (1996, 1997, 1999, 2000), in Pushcart Prize XXII and in The O'Henry Prize Stories 2009.
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 fiction editor at the Boston Review and the Rudge (1948) and Nancy Allen professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He is the cofounder of Voices of Our Nation Workshop.
Junot Diaz's website
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In the video below, Junot Díaz eloquently explains why he enjoys writing about his character Yunior in This Is How You Lose Her; and in the following written interview, he discusses his first book, Drown, and his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
(see also BookBrowse's blog for more about Junot Diaz)
Junot Diaz discusses his first two books, Drown and the The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
How has your life changed since the publication of Drown a decade
ago? Was the sudden acclaim energizing or disorienting?
We're talking eleven years (to be exact), so of course one's life is
bound to change plenty. But Drown acted like an accelerant, it put
things into overdrive. To be honest, in real terms, the publication of my
first book really didn't produce much acclaim. I was known among the
story-writing nerds and the MFA types and the New Yorker crowd
(whoever they are) and in certain sectors of the Dominican community, but
that was about it. Still, even that little bit of "fame" was a lot for an
anonymous immigrant kid from central Jersey who'd worked his way through
school. As for its real effects: I sure wasn't ready for that kind of
attention...
Rabih Alameddine is the author of the novels An Unnecessary Woman; I, the Divine; Koolaids; The Hakawati; The Wrong End of the Telescope; and the story collection, The Perv. In 2019, he won the Dos Passos Prize. (more)
If you enjoyed:
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Try:
The Hakawati
by Rabih Alameddine
Born in Lima, Peru in 1977, Alarcón was raised in Birmingham, Alabama. He is Associate Editor of Etiqueta Negra, an award-winning magazine published in his native Peru, and in 2013 served as a Fellow in the Investigative... (more)
If you enjoyed:
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Try:
At Night We Walk in Circles
by Daniel Alarcon
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