Celebrating 20 Years of DROWN by Junot Díaz!
Riverhead Books is proud to publish Junot Díaz, whose beloved novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao won the Pulitzer Prize and whose most recent story collection This Is How You Lose Her was a National Book Awards finalist. But we are especially thrilled to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Drown, the book that sparked Junot’s tremendous literary career. Published by Riverhead in 1996 to stunning critical acclaim around the world, Drown quickly became a national bestseller and a cherished classic. It was one of the first books to illuminate the lives of Dominican-American immigrants and served as “a front-line report on the ambivalent promise of the American Dream” (San Francisco Chronicle). In the years since we have received countless letters, e-mails and social media posts from readers about the profound influence the story collection has had on their lives. It has inspired young people all over the world to become teachers or writers, to become more involved in their communities or to simply learn more about themselves, their families, and their cultures. Drown launched Junot into the literary stratosphere but it is just as incredible to see how a single book has been able to mobilize an entire generation!
As part of its 20th anniversary celebration we asked you to tell us what Drown means to you. We read dozens of responses and picked a handful to share with everyone. Check them out below! Have a story about Drown that you’d like to share with us? Leave us a comment or reblog this post with your story! We’d love to hear from you.
And if you still can’t get enough Junot Díaz you should listen to this fantastic discussion about the book that aired on the national radio program “The Diane Rehm Show,” then stay tuned to all of our social media channels all summer for more Drown anniversary fun!
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“My first teaching job was in Washington Heights, Manhattan, which is a primarily Dominican-American neighborhood above Harlem and below the South Bronx. Interboro Institute was an urban community college designed for high school dropouts, where students could get their GEDs and Associate Degrees simultaneously. I taught from Junot Díaz’s Drown, and on the first day of classes we read “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie” aloud. Students nodded and laughed. They taught me what “malcriado” meant every semester and made sure I knew what government cheese was. They were delighted to see their neighborhood, their community, people like them, represented in literature. After spending three and a half years as the only white person in the room, that for-profit school went out of business, and I got my second teaching job at Yeshiva University, an Orthodox Jewish school in the same neighborhood. I spent a year and a half as the only non-Jew in the room, and the only woman. I kept teaching Díaz, and years later Tzvi Twersky thanked me for introducing him to Drown because it made him appreciate the Heights more. I’ve since taught from Drown at a tiny rural school in Appalachia, in prisons, at a huge state school in Texas, and at my alma mater in my hometown. The poorest and the richest students, the most liberal and the most conservative, students who struggled to write Standard English and ones who could have gone to the Ivies, have all read—and loved—Drown.” – Erin Stalcup, Flagstaff, AZ
“I broke up with a girl, she threw this book on my lap as she left and reading it taught me to not throw beautiful things away. ‘Nuff said.” – Conlan LaRouche, Philadelphia, PA
“I was teaching for ten years in a bi-lingual college in the neighborhoods of Argyle, Humbolt Park, and Little Village—on the South Side of Chicago—in the nineties. These neighborhoods were filled with immigrants. The South Side was mostly Mexican, Argyle was mostly Vietnamese, and Humbolt Park was mostly Puerto Rican. I loved working with these populations, but in truth they taught me much more than I could ever teach them. My experience teaching immigrants and second generation immigrants provided a backdrop for Díaz’s book, Drown. I came across Drown after I moved to Boston. A fellow writer, Diana Renn, recommended the book, and I fell in love with it at once. Just like I was drowning, I fell into this book. Not as one would leap, jump or dive, but as one would fall. I let myself fall from preconception, judgment, or control. The book is short. Every night I would allow myself a small section of the book. I was like a junkie parceling out pages to luxuriate in. I wanted to stay in this world as long as I could. I dreamed of meeting Junot to thank him for this book. One day it happened. He came to my school to read his most recent book. Thank you for capturing a time and place perfectly!” – Gloria Monaghan, Boston, MA
“My Dominican mother and forever island child from Las Matas De Farfan, Gricelides Saex, gave me my beloved copy of Drown. While not an exact mirror of my personal experience, Drown gave me a sense of validity and reassurance, as here was a place where a Dominican author was exploring the complexities of hybrid Latino identity and struggle, at the epicenter of a deep, dark and touching story. My own hybrid Latino identity felt validated. I could appreciate the influence of my cultural roots while still living my weird, mixed up, punk rock life, without having to feel sorry or ashamed of it. I remember not being able to put Drown down: it’s a fluid read and I soaked up the Spanglish (which spoke volumes to my Jewminican self – a teenager in the midst of a continual, ever evolving identity crisis). The mere mention of “mangu” induced a hunger to continue devouring page upon page, and also to be sitting in my grandmother’s kitchen chowing down on Dominican food.” – Emily Saex, Los Angeles, CA
“I am a South Bronx teacher to 6-12 English Language Learners. This book has opened doors of conversations for my emigrant bilingual students. They love the connections they make, the stories that are told, and the amazing writing they are reading in both English and Spanish.” – Brendaly Torres, New York, NY
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