Junot Diaz

Jefferson Park Clubhouse
321 East 111th Street
New York, NY 10029
Jun 06, 7pm

Junot Díaz is the author of Drown, a collection of ten stories that move from the barrios of the Dominican Republic to the struggling urban communities of New Jersey. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, African Voices, and four volumes of Best American Short Stories. Diaz is the first Dominican-born man to become a major writer in the United States. He moved to the United States with his parents at age six, settling in New Jersey. The New Yorker magazine placed him on a list of the 20 top writers for the 21st century. Diaz graduated from Cedar Ridge High School in Old Bridge, New Jersey. He earned his MFA degree from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York in 1995. He is currently a creative writing professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is almost finished working on his first novel.

On language and writing he has said, “I have a sense of the Dominican…it’s not much of a theory, more a collection of words, a dot dot dash code that I use to […] decipher a larger code, which is the Dominican experience, the Dominican diasporic experience, and the American experience, all hooked together. I always lived in a situation of simultaneity.” Díaz is an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is currently working on a book dealing with the history of the Dominican diaspora.