Author Junot Diaz reads from and discusses his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Díaz’s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Best American Short Stories. His highly-anticipated first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, was greeted with rapturous reviews. The New York Times called it “a book that decisively establishes him as one of contemporary fiction’s most distinctive and irresistible new voices.” His debut story collection, Drown, published eleven years prior to Oscar Wao, has since grown into a landmark of contemporary literature. Born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey, Díaz is a professor of creative writing at MIT.

The Some Favorite Writers series is sponsored by the UCLA Department of English and Friends of English, and organized by Mona Simpson.