Junot Díaz

About
American writer, creative writing professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and fiction editor at Boston Review.

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Highest Rated Comments


Kidskeya192 karma

by being honest and vulnerable and human and by being humble and putting her happiness over yours and most importantly by being happy yourself. but then again: you SO dont want advice from me.

Kidskeya124 karma

i love defending art in places where art is not seen as central. america and mit share a lot in common in this respect.

Kidskeya77 karma

thank you everybody for dropping by! hoping that you all have a great day and are reading something you love with someone you love.

Kidskeya64 karma

i write so many drafts its not funny. ill work on a story for ten, 15 years. like the last tale in THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE HER. i started that shit in 1996

Kidskeya59 karma

if your mindset is about business: humanities doesnt make money, it makes humans and business has never liked humans. if your mindset is human, humaniities makes perfect sense because its about making you a better human. as a writer i majored in history and wrote. one doesnt have to major in writing or english to be a writer. its often better to have other materials rattling around in your head.

Kidskeya49 karma

masculinity is one of the biggest social forces impacting all of our communities. men, unhealthy, diassociated men, do a lot of damage across the board. this is why raising healthy boys matters.

Kidskeya48 karma

i more or less won the lottery and got an agent almost as soon as i tried. but i wasnt very professional about it. met and accepted the first agent that crossed my path. she was super young too and had no real authors under her belt. nowadays a lot of young writers want superstars as agents but what i stumbled on was a very useful truth: better an agent with energy and the time to pay attention to you than someone who is too busy to give you the energy you merit.

Kidskeya48 karma

we all need to interrogate our blindness around our privilege and its an internal process that is often well abetted by books and by thinkers. no way you can read some bell hooks as a man and not have your privilege checked. i think one needs to focus on the process and be honest and read/travel/experience and soon it begins. and if youre lucky it wont stop.

Kidskeya46 karma

in the DR and other latin american/caribbean countries we talk a lot about delincuencia. what we should be talking about is inequality. economic violence from elites always leads to crazy crime on the street. and the worst the economy gets for poor folks the more desperate some of these poor folks become. im an original AD&D man myself. and i LOVED expedition to the barrier peaks.

i can barely write so i cant imagine doing anything else. thank you!

Kidskeya40 karma

i am and its going badly. no other news, sorry.