December 31, 1968 -
Dominican-American writer, professor and fiction editor
Author of "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" (for which he won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2007 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2008), "This Is How You Lose Her" (for which he was a National Book Award finalist and won a N. Y. Times 100 Notable Books Award in 2012) and "Islandborn"
Won the PEN/Malamud Award in 2002
Awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2012
Won the Norman Mailer Prize for Distinguished Writing in 2013
Inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2017