Junot Diaz has had his fiction published in The New Yorker and The Paris Review, and four times in The Best American Short Stories. His critically praised, bestselling debut book, Drown, led to his inclusion among Newsweek's "New Faces of 1996" - the only writer in the group. The New Yorker placed him on a list of the twenty top writers for the twenty-first century. Diaz has won the Eugene McDermott Award, the Lila Wallace- Reader's Digest Writers' Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship, a U.S.-Japan Creative Artists Fellowship from the NEA, and most recently the Rome Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Born in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic, and raised there and in New Jersey, he graduated from Rutgers and received an MFA from Cornell. He lives in New York City and Boston, and is a tenured professor at MIT.

--photo credit: Nancy Crampton