News from Yvelette Stines

In 1996 a book named Drown was published. As stated by many critics, this book changed the face of modern literature. Junot Diaz was the writer of this critically acclaimed, award winning publication. It was then he felt comfortable calling himself a writer. "When I published my first book Drown, I held that baby (in my hands) I knew that I was in this damn thing for life," he says. His next book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, published in 2007, won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. "Triumph, terror, happiness and joy," are words described by Diaz when he won the award although he "never imagined winning anything." What he did realize in his creative writing class at Rutgers University was that writing was something he would do for a lifetime. "I started writing fiction in college, (the) creative writing class (that) I took just seized my imagination, from that moment I imagined the possibility that I could be a writer for life," he says.

Continuing his education to earn a MFA from Cornell University, Diaz is motivated by "the silences within my community. The fact that it seems that I have an ability for entering these silences and come back with something useful," he explains.

Growing up Diaz felt silenced. Born in the Dominican Republic and moving to New Jersey, one of his greatest challenges was "securing a positive sense of self-worth," he says. "Being poor in the United States is like being a leaper in 15th Century Normandy. It dehumanizes and isolates you. Just because your family is broke it doesn't mean you are evil. Being a person of African decent and an immigrant in a society that strongly discriminates against both was also a challenge."

Over coming these challenges, Diaz learned one of his greatest lessons by watching people in libraries. "I saw the love, the passion that readers bring to their books and I wanted to be apart of that. I wanted to make a reader smile when they saw my book on a shelf. Not all readers. Just one or two, that felt like enough."

As he is making many people smile, Diaz reminds us that "the human inside us whispers that we are beautiful and special, that we are not a burden to the universe. It is our duty as people and as artists to try to touch that or to put other people in contact with it."

For more information visit www.junotdiaz.com.

If you are in the New York area November 1, 2008 Junot will be reading at the Brooklyn Public Library at 4PM, Central Library, Dweck Center.