Junot Díaz

• 1. Introduction

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  Junot Díaz was born on the last day of 1968, in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, to Rafael and Virtudes Díaz. He was the third of seven children. For most of his early years, his father was absent, working in the United States while Díaz lived with his mother and grandparents. Then, in December 1974, when Díaz was six years old, the family migrated to Parlin, New Jersey, and he was reunited with his father for the first time in years. Their new home sat less than a mile from what Díaz later described as one of the largest landfills in New Jersey.

  That arrival set the terms for everything that followed. A boy who could not speak English, placed in special education, walking four miles to borrow library books, and working pool-table delivery and dishwashing jobs to put himself through Rutgers. Then, after earning his MFA from Cornell, publishing a debut short story collection in 1995 that critics largely overlooked, only to watch it be re-evaluated a decade later as a landmark of contemporary literature. Then a Pulitzer Prize. Then a MacArthur "Genius Grant." Then, in 2018, a public reckoning that divided literary communities across the country. What makes Díaz's story so hard to look away from is that none of these chapters fits neatly inside the others. The immigrant boy who struggled with English became one of the most decorated writers in America. The advocate for marginalized communities faced allegations of the very abuse of power he had publicly condemned.

• 2. Learning in a Strange Language

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  Madison Park Elementary in New Jersey was where Díaz first encountered the English language, and he remembered the experience bluntly: it "was a miserable experience." He watched as his siblings seemed to acquire English almost overnight. For Díaz, the language did not come easily, and the school eventually contacted the family. He was placed in special education to give him more resources.

  Rather than retreating, Díaz read voraciously. He walked four miles to reach his public library. He became fascinated with apocalyptic fiction and films: the work of John Christopher, the original Planet of the Apes films, and the BBC mini-series Edge of Darkness. These were not casual interests. The pull toward catastrophe, extinction, and survival would run through his own writing decades later, in his work-in-progress science fiction novel and in his longstanding view that science fiction engages with power, dictatorship, and systemic coercion in ways that mainstream literary fiction avoids.

  Díaz graduated from Cedar Ridge High School in Old Bridge Township, New Jersey in 1987. He would not begin writing formally until years later, but the reading habits he built walking to that library, and the particular type of stories he was drawn to, shaped the literary sensibility he eventually brought to his own work.

• 3. Working Through College

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  Díaz attended Kean College in Union, New Jersey for one year before transferring to Rutgers University-New Brunswick, where he completed his Bachelor of Arts in English in 1992. He funded his education through a range of jobs: delivering pool tables, washing dishes, pumping gas, and working at Raritan River Steel. He was also involved in Demarest Hall, a creative-writing living-learning residence hall, and participated in various student organizations.

  At Rutgers, he encountered the writers who redirected his sense of what literature could do: Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros. He has credited them with motivating him to become a writer.

  In a 2010 interview, Díaz reflected on what that period revealed to him about the country he had grown up in. "I can safely say I've seen the US from the bottom up," he said. He acknowledged that his own trajectory could be read as a success story. But he pushed back against that framing when applied to his family: "If you adjust the knob and just take it back one setting to the family unit, I would say my family tells a much more complicated story. It tells the story of two kids in prison. It tells the story of enormous poverty, of tremendous difficulty." That gap between the individual trajectory and the family story became one of the organizing tensions in his fiction.

• 4. The Making of Yunior

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  Shortly after graduating from Rutgers, Díaz took a position at Rutgers University Press as an editorial assistant. Around this time, he created a quasi-autobiographical character named Yunior as part of his MFA application. That character would become the most persistent presence in his body of work.

  Díaz earned his MFA from Cornell University in 1995, writing most of his first short story collection there. He later explained his long-term ambition for the character: "My idea, ever since Drown, was to write six or seven books about him that would form one big novel." Yunior served as narrator in Drown, appeared again in This Is How You Lose Her in 2012, and continued to anchor Díaz's literary vision across nearly two decades.

  The stories in Drown focus on a teenage narrator living in poverty in the Dominican Republic and then in New Jersey, with the absence of a father running through them. Díaz has acknowledged that the father's absence in those stories reflects his own strained relationship with his father, with whom he no longer kept contact. When Díaz published an article in a Dominican newspaper criticizing the country's treatment of Haitians, his father responded by writing a letter to the editor saying the author should "go back home to Haiti."

• 5. Oscar Wao and the Pulitzer

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  The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was published in September 2007. New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani described Díaz's prose style as "a sort of streetwise brand of Spanglish that even the most monolingual reader can easily inhale: lots of flash words and razzle-dazzle talk, lots of body language on the sentences, lots of David Foster Wallace-esque footnotes and asides." Time critic Lev Grossman called it "so astoundingly great" that it was a strong contender to outrun the season's other major releases, including novels by Richard Russo and Philip Roth. Both Time and New York Magazine named it the best novel of 2007, and at least 35 publications placed it on their year-end best lists.

  Díaz described the novel's protagonist in terms drawn from his own adolescence. Oscar was, he explained, "a composite of all the nerds that I grew up with who didn't have that special reservoir of masculine privilege." He added: "Oscar was who I would have been if it had not been for my father or my brother or my own willingness to fight or my own inability to fit into any category easily."

  In 2008, the novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Miramax acquired the rights for a film adaptation in September 2007. A poll of critics conducted in January 2015 named Oscar Wao the best novel of the 21st century to date. Drown, which had received mixed initial reviews, was widely re-evaluated as an important landmark in contemporary literature in the decade following that novel's arrival.

• 6. Activism and Institutional Power

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  Díaz has been active in community organizations in New York City, including Pro-Libertad, the Communist Dominican Workers' Party, and the Unión de Jóvenes Dominicanos. He is a founding member of the Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation, which focuses on writers of color. He has been critical of United States immigration policy, and with author Edwidge Danticat he published an op-ed in The New York Times condemning the Dominican government's deportation of Haitians and Haitian Dominicans.

  The Dominican Republic's Consul General in New York responded by calling Díaz "anti-Dominican" and revoking the Order of Merit the country had awarded him in 2009.

  In May 2010, Díaz was selected to sit on the 20-member Pulitzer Prize board, becoming the first person of Latin background appointed to the panel. He described the appointment as an "extraordinary honor." He has also served as honorary chairman of the DREAM Project, a non-profit education program in the Dominican Republic. In February 2017, Díaz was formally inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

• 7. 2018 and Its Aftermath

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  In May 2018, the author Zinzi Clemmons publicly confronted Díaz, alleging that he had once forcibly cornered and kissed her. Writers Carmen Maria Machado and Monica Byrne shared their own accounts of belittling and condescension by Díaz. Author Alisa Valdes wrote a blog post alleging misogynistic abuse, noting that she had been rebuked earlier for criticizing a fellow Latino author.

  Several weeks before Clemmons came forward, Díaz had published an essay in The New Yorker recounting his own experience of being raped at the age of eight and describing how that childhood abuse had affected his later life and relationships. The essay was widely praised as honest and courageous. Others accused Díaz of attempting to pre-empt scrutiny of his own conduct.

  MIT announced that their investigation had not revealed any evidence of wrongdoing. Boston Review said the allegations lacked the severity associated with the #MeToo movement, a decision the magazine's poetry editors resigned over in protest. Díaz voluntarily stepped down as chair of the Pulitzer Prize board. After a five-month review by an independent law firm, the board found no evidence warranting his removal. It also established that the forcible kiss alleged by Clemmons had been a kiss on the cheek, a detail that journalist Ben Smith described as decisive for the board. Díaz has since been welcomed back onto the Pulitzer board. The Boston Globe later described the case as a turning point in public response to the Me Too movement, in part because the institutional backlash Díaz faced was significantly less severe than what other prominent male figures accused of misconduct had experienced.