Junot Diaz
Junot Díaz is an acclaimed novelist, winner of the MacArthur “Genius Grant” and Pulitzer Prize recipient for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Díaz has never forgotten his school librarian Mrs. Crowell, who believed that one of her Spanish-speaking immigrant pupils would one day write great American novels for a new generation. Díaz emigrated from the Dominican Republic in 1974 and grew up in a low-income, multi-ethnic melting pot in New Jersey, across the river from Manhattan. Díaz sees America “at its margins.” Only by looking “at this country’s farthest edges — the places where we rarely turn our eye — can we get a better sense of what our real values are and what they need to be.”