Junot Díaz (/ˈdʒuːnoʊ/ JOO-noh; born December 31, 1968) is a Dominican American[1] writer, creative writing professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a former fiction editor at Boston Review.

He also serves on the board of advisers for Freedom University, a volunteer organization in Georgia that provides post-secondary instruction to undocumented immigrants.

He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Rutgers University, and shortly after graduating created the character "Yunior", who served as narrator of several of his later books.

[7] Díaz attended Madison Park Elementary[8] and was a voracious reader, often walking four miles to borrow books from his public library.

As his school took notice Diaz's family was contacted and he soon was placed in special education to provide him with more resources and opportunities to learn the language.

At this time he also first created the quasi-autobiographical character of Yunior in a story Díaz used as part of his application for his MFA program in the early 1990s.

[15] He is active in the Dominican American community and is a founding member of the Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation, which focuses on writers of color.

[20] The stories in Drown focus on the teenage narrator's impoverished, fatherless youth in the Dominican Republic and his struggle adapting to his new life in New Jersey.

And he conjures with seemingly effortless aplomb the two worlds his characters inhabit: the Dominican Republic, the ghost-haunted motherland that shapes their nightmares and their dreams; and America (a.k.a.

[26] Writing for Time, critic Lev Grossman said that Díaz's novel was "so astoundingly great that in a fall crowded with heavyweights—Richard Russo, Philip Roth—Díaz is a good bet to run away with the field.

[32] Díaz also won the James Beard Foundation's MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award for his article "He'll Take El Alto", which appeared in Gourmet, September 2007.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Los Angeles Times, Village Voice, Christian Science Monitor, New Statesman, Washington Post, and Publishers Weekly were among the 35 publications that placed the novel on their 'Best of 2007' lists.

[36] Stanford University dedicated a symposium to Junot Díaz in 2012, with roundtables of leading US Latino/a Studies scholars commenting on his creative writing and activism.

[42] In his review of the book on online arts and culture journal Frontier Psychiatrist, editor-in-chief Keith Meatto wrote: "While This Is How You Lose Her will surely advance Diaz's literary career, it may complicate his love life.

"[43] One reviewer wrote, "The stories in This Is How You Lose Her, by turns hilarious and devastating, raucous and tender, lay bare the infinite longing and inevitable weaknesses of our all-too-human hearts.

They capture the heat of new passion, the recklessness with which we betray what we most treasure, and the torture we go through – "the begging, the crawling over glass, the crying" – to try to mend what we've broken beyond repair.

The story follows an Afro-Latina girl named Lola whose journey takes her back to collect memories of her country of origin, Dominican Republic.

[65][66][67] Other women, including the writers Carmen Maria Machado and Monica Byrne, responded on Twitter with their own accounts of "belittling" and condescension by Díaz.

[68] Several weeks before Clemmons made her allegations,[78][79][80] Díaz had published an essay in The New Yorker, recounting his own experience of being raped at the age of eight, along with its effect on his later life and relationships.

"[85][86] While not dismissing the allegations, they cautioned against an "uncritical" and "sensationalist" handling of the issue that they said could reinforce stereotypes of Black people and Latinos as sexual predators.

[89][77][90][91] The editors of Boston Review also announced that Díaz would stay on at the magazine,[77][92] writing that the allegations lacked "the kind of severity that animated the #MeToo movement".

[94] Following an initial statement in which he wrote of taking "responsibility for my past", Díaz later denied having inappropriately kissed Clemmons; he stated that "people had already moved on to the punishment phase" and that he doubted his denial would be believed at first.

[98][99] After a five-month review by an independent law firm, the board announced it "did not find evidence warranting removal of Professor Diaz".