Be transported to the worlds of these award-winning authors who are both writing professors at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Junot Diaz
Junot Diaz’s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Best American Short Stories. His critically acclaimed debut novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, mixes political criticism with elements of science fiction, fantasy games and urban street culture. The novel won the National Book Critics Circle Award for best novel of 2007 and the Pulitizer Prize. His story collection, Drown, published eleven years prior to Oscar Wao is respected as a hallmark of contemporary literature. Born in the Dominican Republic and reared in New Jersey, Diaz is a professor of creative writing at MIT.
Anita Desai
Born in India to a German mother and a Bengali father, Anita Desai’s evocative fiction focuses on uprooted and marginalized identities, the confinement of women, and parallels between the East and the West. She is the author of several novels, including the award winning Fire on the Mountain, In Custody (which was made into a Merchant Ivory film), and The Village by the Sea, winner of the Guardian Children’s Fiction Award. Her most recent novel, The Zig Zag Way, traces the journey of an American academic to Mexico. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Desai is the John E. Burchard Professor of Writing at MIT.
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