Junot D�az was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic and was raised in New Jersey. His fiction has appeared in numerous publications including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, African Voices, and Best American Short Stories. He wrote the story collection Drown and the novel 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. He is a professor of creative writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.