An Interview with Junot Díaz

Dominican author, Junot Diaz sat for an interview with the Columbia Daily Spectator.

If the name Junot Díaz doesn’t make your inner bookworm swoon, by now, it should at least be familiar. His novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and collections of short stories Drown and This Is How You Lose Her have taken the literary world by storm. As if his achievements in literature weren’t enough—he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2008 and is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow—he’s also a professor at MIT and fiction editor at the Boston Review. This week, he talked to Dunni Oduyemi about the immigrant experience, the relationship between fiction and history, and what he wishes he’d learned in college.

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CS) What made you decide to teach creative writing at MIT? Has being a professor changed your writing?

JD) Frankly it was the best job I was offered at the time. This was before I had published Oscar Wao and for me Boston seemed like a huge leg up from Syracuse. I quickly found myself very much at home at MIT...

Read the full interview: Freedom Writer, An Interview with Junot Díaz