Author Junot Diaz – A Dominican Voice
Who knew back in 1968 that a child born in Santo Domingo would one day win the Pulitzer Prize for a novel written almost 40 years later? Junot Diaz was that child. Born into a Dominican family on New Year's Eve of 1968, Junot spent the first years of his life living with his mother in the capitol of the Dominican Republic, and in 1974 he moved to New Jersey to live with his father. During his years at Madison Park Elementary School, Junot was reading books constantly and always borrowing books from the public library. He undoubtedly encountered great stories by great authors who would later inspire him to write his own. He would read works by Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros who inspired his own writing during his college years at Kean College and Rutgers College where he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in English. Junot was a busy college student, working at Rutgers University Press as an editorial assistant, taking part in student organizations and finding time to write. During his years at Cornell University where he received a Master of Fine Arts degree, he wrote most of the stories that would form part of his first short story collection (Drown, 1996). His literary work has since been printed in many publications such as The New Yorker, Story, The Paris Review, The Best American Short Stories, The PEN/O, Henry Prize Stories, and African Voices. He has won a great share of awards and prizes for his work and was part of the New Yorker's list of the top 20 writers in the 21st century.
His debut short story collection "Drown" placed Junot Diaz on the scene as an insightful new author with a powerful voice. The collection includes ten stories portraying adolescent boys growing up in the rough neighborhoods of the Dominican Republic and New Jersey; struggling to find their identity, struggling to come to terms with their emerging sexuality and struggling to find a place of belonging in a world rooted in poverty, crime and the allure of drugs. Junot writes about a world of absent fathers and mothers fighting to hold together families collapsing with poverty and lack of structure.
After "Drown", Junot struggled with overcoming a writer's block and it took more than a decade before his second work of fiction was ready. Junot described it as "…a perfect storm of insecurity and madness and pressure and you name it. Every now and then you catch one, bro, and I caught a fucking bad one"(1).
How did this writer's block come about? Junot said that "it wasn't that I couldn't write. I wrote every day. I actually worked really hard at writing. At my desk by 7 A.M., would work a full eight and more. Scribbled at the dinner table, in bed, on the toilet, on the No. 6 train, at Shea Stadium. I did everything I could. But none of it worked. (…) It was like I had somehow slipped into a No-Writing Twilight Zone and I couldn't find an exit. (…) I wrote and I wrote and I wrote, but nothing I produced was worth a damn."(2)
Despite the hardships that Junot endured throughout those long eleven years, the outcome was worth it. He wrote his most famous novel (his only novel to date) perhaps quite literarily with blood, sweat and tears that became "The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" (2007). This is the story of Oscar Wao, a Dominican immigrant living in New Jersey who is overweight and finds himself on the outside of adolescent social circles. He is a physically self-conscious nerd, an outcast who dreams of few and simple things – of becoming a writer and following in the footsteps of the likes of J.R.R. Tolkien and of finding love. But simple things do not come easily to Oscar who seems to have been struck by the curse (the fukú), which has haunted his family (and many others) for generations.
In the process of writing "The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao", Junot found his story, his voice and his identity as a writer emerging from a hopeless feeling of not being able to write and the hours of persistently trying. The novel won him the prestigious Pulitzer Prize in 2008 and was voted as the best novel of 2007 by the New Yorker, Time Magazine, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post.
Apart from writing his own stories, Junot is a strong and motivating influence for other writers. In 2010 he received the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers award for his contributions in encouraging writers. Today he keeps a regular day job as a professor of creative writing at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Will Junot ever write and publish another novel or was the experience of writing the first one too overwhelming? The answer to that question will remain for his audience to wait and see.
(1) http://nymag.com/guides/fallpreview/2007/books/36501/
(2) http://www.oprah.com/spirit/Junot-Diaz-Talks-About-What-Made-Him-Become-a-Writer
His debut short story collection "Drown" placed Junot Diaz on the scene as an insightful new author with a powerful voice. The collection includes ten stories portraying adolescent boys growing up in the rough neighborhoods of the Dominican Republic and New Jersey; struggling to find their identity, struggling to come to terms with their emerging sexuality and struggling to find a place of belonging in a world rooted in poverty, crime and the allure of drugs. Junot writes about a world of absent fathers and mothers fighting to hold together families collapsing with poverty and lack of structure.
After "Drown", Junot struggled with overcoming a writer's block and it took more than a decade before his second work of fiction was ready. Junot described it as "…a perfect storm of insecurity and madness and pressure and you name it. Every now and then you catch one, bro, and I caught a fucking bad one"(1).
How did this writer's block come about? Junot said that "it wasn't that I couldn't write. I wrote every day. I actually worked really hard at writing. At my desk by 7 A.M., would work a full eight and more. Scribbled at the dinner table, in bed, on the toilet, on the No. 6 train, at Shea Stadium. I did everything I could. But none of it worked. (…) It was like I had somehow slipped into a No-Writing Twilight Zone and I couldn't find an exit. (…) I wrote and I wrote and I wrote, but nothing I produced was worth a damn."(2)
Despite the hardships that Junot endured throughout those long eleven years, the outcome was worth it. He wrote his most famous novel (his only novel to date) perhaps quite literarily with blood, sweat and tears that became "The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" (2007). This is the story of Oscar Wao, a Dominican immigrant living in New Jersey who is overweight and finds himself on the outside of adolescent social circles. He is a physically self-conscious nerd, an outcast who dreams of few and simple things – of becoming a writer and following in the footsteps of the likes of J.R.R. Tolkien and of finding love. But simple things do not come easily to Oscar who seems to have been struck by the curse (the fukú), which has haunted his family (and many others) for generations.
In the process of writing "The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao", Junot found his story, his voice and his identity as a writer emerging from a hopeless feeling of not being able to write and the hours of persistently trying. The novel won him the prestigious Pulitzer Prize in 2008 and was voted as the best novel of 2007 by the New Yorker, Time Magazine, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post.
Apart from writing his own stories, Junot is a strong and motivating influence for other writers. In 2010 he received the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers award for his contributions in encouraging writers. Today he keeps a regular day job as a professor of creative writing at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Will Junot ever write and publish another novel or was the experience of writing the first one too overwhelming? The answer to that question will remain for his audience to wait and see.
(1) http://nymag.com/guides/fallpreview/2007/books/36501/
(2) http://www.oprah.com/spirit/Junot-Diaz-Talks-About-What-Made-Him-Become-a-Writer
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