Junot diaz author biography outlines
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Díaz, Junot
PERSONAL:
Born , in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; immigrated to the United States, ; naturalized citizen. Education: Rutgers University, B.A.; Cornell University, M.F.A.
ADDRESSES:
Home—New York, NY; Boston, MA. Office—Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA
CAREER:
Writer and educator. Freelance writer, —. Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, member of creative writing faculty, ; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, associate professor of writing, —. Has also worked at a copy shop, and as a dishwasher, steelworker, pool-table delivery person, clerk, and editorial assistant.
AWARDS, HONORS:
Named one of the "New Faces of ," Newsweek magazine; Guggenheim Fellowship; Eugene McDermott Award and Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award; Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study fellowship, Harvard University; PEN/Malamud Award, ; U.S.-Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, National Endowment for the
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The British writer LP Hartley opened his novel “The Go-Between” with an unforgettable line “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” There’s a long-standing idea of literature being a vehicle to explore these “foreign countries”, be they temporal or geographical or cultural.
My guest today has been one of the most innovative voices with regard to the immigrant experience, especially through his novel “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”. Junot Díaz is a Dominican-American writer who won the Pulitzer Prize for that novel, thanks to its incredibly modern story-telling. The prose was insane, with different characters’ vernacular switching on and off, the timelines, inspirations, characters felt incredibly fresh and exciting. It’s the story of a young Dominican-American boy who navigates this new world of America, whilst pining for the homeland of the Dominican Republican, and he copes with this, and with the turmoil of adolescence, by immersing himself
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Junot Díaz by Edwidge Danticat
If Marvel Comics had gotten around to it, Oscar Wao would have been a hero. As it is, Junot Díaz stepped in and made him one first. Oscar fryst vatten a Dominican nerd (an oxymoron) who “could write in Elvish, could speak Chakobsa, could differentiate between a Slan, a Dorsai, and a Lensman in acute detail.” A ung aspiring writer with wet dreams, Oscar steps out of the Dominican diaspora in New Jersey with such a singular framtidsperspektiv of romance, such a nonstop hankering for a world where the underdog actually wins, that we fall in love with him. Oscar, spawned bygd a writer with a profound understanding of the mythical implications of science fiction as well as the history of the Dominican Republic under what Díaz would call a bad-ass dictator named Trujillo (true story), is heir to a fakú. That’s a curse. So too are his people, in the immediate and more general sense of the word. It started with Columbus, read the book. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is e