2008 Pulitzer Prize Winner Junot Díaz to Speak on Campu

Díaz will conduct a Master Class in English and speak at the All-School Meeting.

September 30, 2008 - Junot Díaz, a Dominican-American writer whose first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction earlier this year, will speak on Wednesday, October 15 from 1 to 2:30 p.m. in the Tang Theatre in George Washington Hall on the Phillips Academy campus. Diaz will conduct a Master Class to which all English department classes have been invited. He will also address the All-School Meeting that Wednesday morning, speaking about his novel as part of the Academy's celebration of Hispanic Heritage month.

Born in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic, in 1968, Díaz lived with his mother, grandmother and siblings for his first six years while his father worked in the United States. He was reunited with his father in 1974 when he immigrated to New Jersey and entered school there. In his novels he draws on his upbringing divided between the two countries, centering on the duality of the immigrant experience.

Exposed to creative writing at Rutgers College, Díaz has said he was inspired by exposure to writers such as Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros. After graduating from Rutgers College in 1992, Díaz went on to earn an MFA degree at Cornell University, where he wrote most of his first collection of stories.

Díaz currently holds a teaching position at MIT and is also the fiction editor for the Boston Review. His fiction has appeared in the New Yorker magazine, which listed him as one of the top writers of the 21st century. His work has appeared in the Paris Review, The Best American Short Stories four times, and in African Voices.

Drown, Díaz collection of short stories published in 1996, is largely autobiographical and details the fierce struggle of a teenaged Dominican boy growing up in poverty in the land of his birth, then adapting to an immigrant's life in New Jersey. Nine years later, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao burst on the literary scene and won rave reviews. Besides the Pulitzer, it won the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Novel of 2007, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. Time and New York Magazine named the novel the best of the year 2007.