Junot Díaz

Díaz was born in Santo Domingo and immigrated with his family to Parlin, New Jersey, at age six, growing up in poverty under a strict, often absent father who had preceded them to the United States. He studied at Rutgers and earned an MFA at Cornell, publishing the story collection Drown at twenty-eight to wide acclaim.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao took over a decade to complete, fusing genre fandom, Spanglish, and the long shadow of the Trujillo dictatorship into a voice unlike anything in American fiction; it won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008. He taught creative writing at MIT for many years.

In 2018, several women publicly accused him of past sexual misconduct and verbal abuse, allegations that prompted institutional investigations and reshaped public discussion of his work and standing in the literary world.