Diaz, Junot 1968-

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DIAZ, Junot 1968-

PERSONAL: Born 1968, in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; immigrated to the United States, c. 1975; naturalized citizen. Education: Rutgers University, B.A.; Cornell University, M.F.A.

ADDRESSES: Home—Brooklyn, NY. Agent—c/o Vintage Books, Knopf Publishing Group, 299 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10171.

CAREER: Has worked at a copy shop, and as a dishwasher, steelworker, pool-table delivery person, and an editorial assistant; freelance writer, c. 1996—.

AWARDS, HONORS: Named one of the "New Faces of 1996," Newsweek magazine; "New Voices" award nomination, Quality Paperback Books, 1997, for Drown; Guggenheim Fellowship.

WRITINGS:

Drown, Riverhead Books (New York, NY), 1996.

Negocios (stories from Drown, in Spanish), Vintage Books (New York, NY), 1997.

(Editor) The Beacon Best of 2001: Great Writing by Women and Men of All Colors and Cultures, Beacon Books (Boston, MA), 2001.

Contributor to the anthology Best American Short Stories 1996; contributor of fiction to periodicals, including New Yorker, Story, Paris Review, and African Verse. Has also written book reviews for Entertainment Weekly.

WORK IN PROGRESS: A novel, the story of a young Latino trying to thrive in New York City, with the working title The Cheater's Guide to Love.

SIDELIGHTS: Like the narrators of many of the short stories in his acclaimed first fiction collection Drown, Junot Diaz was born in the Dominican Republic and spent his early childhood in that country before his father was able to bring the family to the United States. But there the similarity ends. Many of Diaz's characters are adolescent drug dealers, while he himself obtained a literature and history degree from Rutgers University and studied creative writing at Cornell University. Diaz confided to Alexandra Lange in New York magazine: "I love catching people making the mistake of saying, 'Well, when you do this in the book,' and I'm like: It's fiction." He added that "nothing quiets a purportedly professional journalist more than being caught making that mistake." Diaz was the only writer to be named one of Newsweek magazine's "New Faces of 1996," and Drown was nominated for the Quality Paperback Book Club's "New Voices" award in 1997. "Ysrael," one of the stories from Drown, was selected for publication in the Best American Short Stories 1996 anthology.

Drown's title story concerns an adolescent narrator—a drug dealer—reacting to the knowledge that his best friend is gay. "Ysrael," set in the Dominican Republic, tells the tale of a boy whose face has been chewed off by a pig, and the taunting he suffers from his peers. The same character shows up again in another story in Drown; by now he has come to America, and is set to have reconstructive surgery. "Aguantando" describes the life of the most frequent narrator as a child in the Dominican Republic, watching his mother try to support the family while they wait for his father to send for them. "Fiesta, 1980" takes place after the same narrator has been reunited with his father, and readers are shown the father's unsympathetic nature via a depiction of his reaction to his son's chronic car-sickness. One of Drown's more controversial tales is "How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie." According to Lange, the story "offers a glimpse into the mind of the teenage boy, with a racial twist." She summarized: "It's about getting some, any way you can." Diaz told her, however, that he "wrote that story after sitting in a professor's class and having a professor tell us how white people were so diabolically evil. Then, of course, we saw him one day . . . with his white wife."

Critical response to Drown was generally favorable. Rebecca Stuhr-Rommereim recommended the collection in Library Journal. Though she maintained that occasionally Diaz's writing was "somewhat strained," she asserted that "he provides convincing portraits." A reviewer for Publishers Weekly called Drown an "intense debut collection," and went on to observe that the tales in it possessed "a lasting resonance." A Kirkus Reviews critic concluded: "Diaz's spare style and narrative poise make for some disturbing fiction, full of casual violence and indifferent morality. A debut calculated to raise some eyebrows."

Diaz edited The Beacon Best of 2001: Great Writing by Women and Men of All Cultures and Colors, which Margaret Flanagan in Booklist called an "exhilarating literary alternative [that] provides a necessary counterbalance" to more mainstream collections. A reviewer in Publishers Weekly dubbed it an "excellent collection."

In an interview for the Latino News Network online, Diaz described the experience of being catapulted into the literary limelight, as he was in the wake of Drown: "It was completely overwhelming," he told Michael O. Collazo. "I was not really mentally prepared for it. So instead of making mistakes—which meant . . . going nuts with the money or just going bananas and like changing who I was . . . what I did was shut down....AndI found it hard to write."

Having overcome some of his shock at early success, however, he had begun to work in earnest on a widely anticipated novel in English, and was taking stock of his place in the traditions of Latin American, African American, and specifically Dominican writers. "I feel like I have come from a long line of people," he explained, "and I'm just trying to do this idea that like, yo, we young people have insights. I'm not that young anymore, but like it takes a while to get a book done. When you're a new young writer, you need to say, 'yo, this is the way the world is' and hope to God that, in a few years, another young writer modifies it and says, 'this is the way the world is.'"