Chapter 4: Processes: How Are Texts Composed?

Becoming a Writer

JUNOT DÍAZ

Díaz, Junot. “Becoming a Writer.” O, The Oprah Magazine. Oprah.com, 13 Oct. 2009. Web. 16 Feb. 2010.

Framing the Reading

Junot Díaz is an American writer, born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey, who has written two books of short stories and one novel. His novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2008. His difficult experience writing that novel is the one that Díaz describes here as taking ten years of “heartbreak” and “fail” to write. Despite his many struggles with writing, Díaz has won a number of awards, including a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He currently teaches writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and serves as the fiction editor for the Boston Review. He also founded the Voices of Our Nation workshop for writers of color.