The New Student Book Forum Blog is a place for students, faculty, and staff to have the chance to participate in an online discussion about the summer reading book "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" by Junot Diaz. This forum is meant to enrich the experience of reading the assigned book as an individual student and as a member of the Brandeis community. Please check back often to see new faculty updates as well as to add your own comments to make this blog the literary voice of incoming Brandeis students before you even arrive on campus!
Junot Diaz: Author of "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Woa"
Diaz will be visiting Brandeis on August 26th as part of first year orientation to speak and take questions on his Pulitzer- prize winning novel
The Author: Junot Diaz
According to his personal website:
Junot Díaz was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic and is the author of Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao which won the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, African Voices, Best American Short Stories (1996, 1997, 1999, 2000), in Pushcart Prize XXII and in The O'Henry Prize Stories 2009.
He has received a Eugene McDermott Award, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, a Lila Acheson Wallace Readers Digest Award, the 2002 Pen/Malamud Award, the 2003 US-Japan Creative Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the fiction editor at the Boston Review and the Rudge (1948) and Nancy Allen professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.