Junot Diaz, the English Department's 2009 Millett Writing Fellow, spoke to the Wesleyan community April 1 in Memorial Chapel. Diaz is the author of Drown, a collection of short stories, and the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize, the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
Diaz has appeared in The New Yorker, African Voices, Best American Short Stories, and in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2009. Diaz has received a Eugene McDermott Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2002 PEN/Malamud Award, the 2003 U.S.-Japan Creative Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the fiction editor at The Boston Review and is the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Diaz drew an audience of students, staff, faculty and community members. His talk was co-sponsored by the Writing Program. (Photos by Olivia Bartlett)
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