Díaz

Fiction writer Junot Díaz, MFA '95, has been awarded a 2012 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, popularly known as a "genius award."

Díaz won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his 2007 debut novel "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" and last visited the Cornell campus in 2009 to accept the Cornell University/Cornell Council for the Arts Artist of the Year Award.

His third book, a current best-seller and critical success, is "This Is How You Lose Her," a collection of stories, some of which are narrated by Díaz's recurring character Yunior from "Oscar Wao" and "Drown," his 1996 story collection. Díaz wrote most of the stories in "Drown" while he was an MFA student in creative writing at Cornell.

The Dominican-American author teaches writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His other honors include the National Book Critics Circle 2007 award for fiction, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship, a Lila Acheson Wallace Readers Digest Award, the 2002 Pen/Malamud Award, and a one-year American Academy of the Arts fellowship in Rome.

In all, 23 honorees from a variety of fields received MacArthur fellowships this year; each award is worth $500,000 over the next five years. The 2012 roster includes photographers Uta Barth and An-My Le, anti-poverty social services innovator Maurice Lim Miller, marine ecologist Nancy Rabalais, computer scientist Daniel Spielman, mandolinist Chris Thile of Nickel Creek and The Punch Brothers, and neurosurgeon Benjamin Warf.

The MacArthur awards are intended to encourage innovation. The award comes with no strings attached; recipients are free to do what they wish, including pursuing new work or working in a different field.

Cornellians among MacArthur honorees in recent years include faculty members Michal Lipson, electrical and computer engineering; Jon Kleinberg '93, computer science; and Paul Ginsparg, physics and computer and information science; and several alumni including Sara Horowitz '84, Erik Mueggler '87, Sendhil Mullainathan '93 and Daniela Rus, M.S. '90, Ph.D. '92.