Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novelist and Alumnus, Will be Keynote Speaker at Rutgers’ 246th Commencement May 13

Credit: Courtesy Don Usner

Junot Díaz

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. – Junot Díaz, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and Rutgers alumnus, will be the keynote speaker at Rutgers’ 246th anniversary Commencement Sunday, May 13, it was announced at today’s Board of Governors meeting in Camden.

Díaz also will receive an honorary Doctor of Letters degree at the 12:30 p.m. universitywide graduation ceremony at High Point Solutions Stadium in Piscataway. He earned his bachelor’s degree in English from Rutgers College in 1992. Díaz was inducted into the Rutgers Hall of Distinguished Alumni in 2010 and has been active at the university over the years, participating in such programs as the Writers at Rutgers Reading Series. 

Díaz was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a novel about a repressed, intellectual Dominican growing up in New Jersey and which takes place, in part, at Rutgers in New Brunswick. On the best-seller lists for two years, the book also won the National Book Critics Award for Best Novel and the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, among other honors, securing Díaz a place among the most creative, inventive and influential writers of the 21st century. An option for the novel, which has been translated into 33 languages, has been picked up by a major motion picture studio.

Díaz is a professor of creative writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His own journey could be the subject of a great American novel. His family left a poor neighborhood in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, for Parlin, N.J., in 1974 when Díaz was 6. He became an avid reader and eventually enrolled at Kean College for a year before transferring to Rutgers and majoring in English while holding part-time jobs to pay for his education.

At Rutgers, he resided at a creative writing, living-learning residence hall where he was exposed to such writers as Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros, who would motivate him toward his own literary career. In 1989, he won the first Mitchell Adelman Memorial Scholarship in Creative Writing awarded at Rutgers.

Díaz earned a Master of Fine Arts degree at Cornell University and wrote a series of stories drawing on his experiences in the Dominican Republic and New Jersey. The stories formed his first book, Drown, in 1996. A best-seller and critical success, it has been recognized as an important landmark in contemporary literature.

Díaz’s work has appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Time Out, Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Book of Short Stories. Díaz edited The Beacon Best of 2001: Great Writing by Women and Men of All Colors and Cultures and co-wrote the screenplay for Washington Heights, directed by Alfredo de Villa.

Díaz has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters among his many honors. He will receive a $30,000 honorarium paid with private funds raised by the Rutgers University Foundation.