Junot Díaz was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. After a year at Kean College he took a BA in English at Rutgers University in 1992, then an MFA at Cornell University in 1995.
His work centers on the experience of Latino immigrants. He teaches creative writing at MIT, where he holds the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing chair, was fiction editor of the Boston Review, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.