Just Buffalo closes out its 11th season of BABEL with MacArthur "genius" Junot Díaz.
Born in the Dominican Republic, Díaz immigrated to New Jersey when he was 6 years old. As a non-native speaker, Díaz mastered the English language as a young boy by reading—walking four miles, each way, to his public library to immerse himself in the world of books. Now a Professor of Writing at MIT, his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao earned him a Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, and was named TIME Magazine's Best Book of the Year. More recently, critics named this bittersweet and laugh-out-loud funny portrait of a multigenerational family with its "mash-up of Dominican history, comics, sci-fi, [and] magic realism" "the best novel of the 21st century to date."
photo © Nina Subin