Lannan Foundation

Junot Díaz is the author of Drown, a collection of ten stories that move from the barrios of the Dominican Republic to the struggling urban communities of New Jersey. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, African Voices, and four volumes of Best American Short Stories.

On language and writing he has said, “I have a sense of the Dominican…it’s not much of a theory, more a collection of words, a dot dot dash code that I use to […] decipher a larger code, which is the Dominican experience, the Dominican diasporic experience, and the American experience, all hooked together. I always lived in a situation of simultaneity.” Díaz is an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is currently working on a book dealing with the history of the Dominican diaspora.