Junot Díaz

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Junot Díaz is a fiction writer. An associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he is the author of Drown (Riverhead Books, 1996).

At the Radcliffe Institute, Díaz will be writing a novel, “The Guilty Country,” set in a not-so-distant United States where the civil-rights movements of the sixties and seventies were destroyed by martial law. The novel’s narrative follows a young woman living in City, who is a member of a new minority. In spite of massive repression, she secretly documents the testimonies of women who were imprisoned and tortured during the State of Emergency.

Díaz has received a Eugene McDermott Award, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, a Lila Acheson Wallace Readers Digest Award, the 2002 PEN/Malamud Award, and the 2003 US/Japan Creative Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.