Can I tell you how much I love Junot Diaz? I never would have thought a book about a Dominican-American geek (“The Brief & Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”) win the Pulitzer Prize. It wasn’t even until college that I knew there were Hispanic American authors writing stories that felt like they could have been drawn from my Spanglish upbringing.

In an interview with Narrative magazine, Diaz tells all about growing up in poverty, who and what inspired him to write, about his increasing anxieties about writing and 11 years to write his award-wining first novel.