Short answers, pulled from the story.
Junot Díaz is best known for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, published in September 2007, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was named the best novel of the 21st century to date in a January 2015 poll of US critics. His short story collection Drown (1996) is also widely regarded as a landmark of contemporary literature.
Junot Díaz was born on the 31st of December 1968, in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. He migrated to Parlin, New Jersey in December 1974 at the age of six, joining his father who had been working in the United States.
Junot Díaz received the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and a $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship Genius Grant in 2012. He has also received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship, the 2002 PEN/Malamud Award, and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among others.
Yunior is a quasi-autobiographical character Díaz first created when applying for his MFA program in the early 1990s. The character serves as narrator in Drown and reappears in This Is How You Lose Her (2012). Díaz has said his intention since Drown was to write six or seven books about Yunior that would collectively form one large novel.
In May 2018, author Zinzi Clemmons publicly alleged that Díaz had once forcibly cornered and kissed her; other writers shared additional accounts of belittling behavior. MIT found no evidence of wrongdoing after an investigation. After a five-month review, an independent law firm found no evidence warranting Díaz's removal from the Pulitzer Prize board, and he later rejoined the board.
Junot Díaz teaches creative writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he holds the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing chair. He has also served as fiction editor at Boston Review and was a Millet Writing Fellow at Wesleyan University in 2009.