Latino Trailblazers: Junot Diaz

Happy Hispanic Heritage Month! Celebrate the importance of Latino culture with Being Latino, Best Buy and our partners.

We’re paying tribute to the generations of Hispanic Americans who have positively influenced and enriched our nation and society. A new tribute airs each weekday from September 17 – October 12

Today’s Trailblazer is Junot Díaz . He is a Dominican-American writer, creative writing professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and fiction editor at Boston Review. Central to Díaz’s work is the immigrant experience. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, in 2008.

Díaz has been active in a number of community organizations in New York City, from Pro-Libertad, to the Dominican Workers’ Party (Partido de los Trabajadores Dominicanos), and the Unión de Jóvenes Dominicanos (lit. “Dominican Youth Union”). He has been critical of immigration policy in the United States. With fellow author Edwidge Danticat, Díaz published an op-ed piece in The New York Times condemning the illegal deportation of Haitians and Haitian Dominicans by the Dominican government.

On May 22, 2010, it was announced that Díaz had been selected to sit on the 20-member Pulitzer Prize board of jurors. Díaz described his appointment, and the fact that he is the first Latino to be appointed to the panel, as an “extraordinary honor” Junot most recently released This Is How You Lose Her, a collection of short stories surrounding the topic of impulsive infidelity.