Junot Díaz (/ˈdʒuːnoʊ/ JOO-noh; born December 31, 1968) is a Dominican American writer, creative writing professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a former fiction editor at Boston Review. Central to Díaz's work is the immigrant experience, particularly the Latino immigrant experience.

Born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Díaz migrated with his family to New Jersey when he was six years old. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Rutgers University, and shortly after graduating created the character "Yunior", who served as narrator of several of his later books. After obtaining his MFA from Cornell University, Díaz published his first book, the 1995 short story collection Drown.

Diaz received the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and received a MacArthur Fellowship "Genius Grant" in 2012.

Díaz was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic on December 31, 1968, to Rafael and Virtudes Díaz. He was the third child among seven siblings. Throughout most of his early childhood, he lived with his mother and grandparents while his father worked in the United States. In December 1974 he migrated to Parlin, New Jersey, where he was re-united with his father. There he lived less than a mile from what he has described as "one of the largest landfills in New Jersey".

Díaz attended Madison Park Elementary and was a voracious reader, often walking four miles to borrow books from his public library. At this time Díaz became fascinated with apocalyptic films and books, especially the work of John Christopher, the original Planet of the Apes films, and the BBC mini-series Edge of Darkness. Growing up Diaz struggled greatly with learning the English language. He comments that it "was a miserable experience" for him, especially since it seemed that all of his other siblings "acquired the language in a matter of months; in some ways, it felt overnight". As his school took notice Diaz's family was contacted and he soon was placed in special education to provide him with more resources and opportunities to learn the language.

Díaz graduated from Cedar Ridge High School in 1987 (now called Old Bridge High School) in Old Bridge Township, New Jersey, though he would not begin to write formally until years later.

Díaz attended Kean College in Union, New Jersey, for one year before transferring and ultimately completing his BA at Rutgers University-New Brunswick in 1992, majoring in English; there he was involved in Demarest Hall, a creative-writing, living-learning, residence hall, and in various student organizations. He was exposed to the authors who would motivate him to become a writer: Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros. He worked his way through college by delivering pool tables, washing dishes, pumping gas, and working at Raritan River Steel. During an interview conducted in 2010, Díaz reflected on his experience growing up in America and working his way through college:

I can safely say I've seen the US from the bottom up ... I may be a success story as an individual. But if you adjust the knob and just take it back one setting to the family unit, I would say my family tells a much more complicated story. It tells the story of two kids in prison. It tells the story of enormous poverty, of tremendous difficulty.^{[citation needed]}