She has written for The Atlantic, Time (magazine), The Best American Essays, Tin House, The Sun, The Fader, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, Longreads, [1].

Díaz, in an interview she gave to Origins, tells stories of being menaced by a machete-armed man, and of raids by the local Police force, referred to as los camarones.

[6] Growing up in Miami Beach during what she describes as the city's "urban blight,"[7][8] she had a difficult life, marked by drug use, attempts at suicide, and encounters with the law.

Her father, who had studied at the University of Puerto Rico and whom she describes as a lover of poetry and literature, became a drug dealer in order to support the family.

[12] [13] Díaz's fiction and essays, which are predominantly set in Puerto Rico and Miami, have been described as "lyrical" and "urgent" and are often focused on the intensely personal tragedies and triumphs of young women maturing in a dangerous world.

[15] In 2017, Los Angeles Times critic Walton Muyumba listed Díaz as "part of a necessary cipher of extremely gifted freestylers" that includes writers Ta-Nehisi Coates, Isabel Wilkerson, Carol Anderson, Claudia Rankine, Terrance Hayes, Kiese Laymon, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Junot Díaz, and Jelani Cobb,[16] and she was listed among Remezcla's "15 Latinx Music Journalists You Should be Reading"[1] and was included in NPR's Alt.Latino's Favorites: The Songs of 2017, as one of "the cream of the crop of Latinx music writers.

[citation needed] Jaquira Diaz is a queer Afro-Latina who grew up in the public housing projects of Puerto Rico and later moved to Miami.