Junot Díaz is an acclaimed writer and recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and the National Book Award for Fiction. He is the author of two collections of stories, This Is How You Lose Her (2013) and Drown (1997), and the best-selling novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008).

On October 7, 2014, he presented at the PepsiCo Theater at The Performing Arts Center, where he read from his book Drown and answered audience questions.