The renowned Dominican American writer Junot Díaz (b. 1968) is a polymath of many talents: A winner of the Pulitzer Prize and McArthur Genius awards, a human rights activist, a journalist, an MIT Creative Writing professor, a public intellectual, and a troubadour of the African diaspora. He has risen to prominence against painstaking odds, translating his ontology into a mastery of genre and aesthetics. Díaz paints the world through a Borgesian Aleph lens: Multiple realities all at once that reach far across the globe. In other words, his writing registers both “mean streets” and academic erudition and alternates between local structures of racial inequality and world-systems theory, always infused with a healthy dose of profanity and humor