When Junot Diaz’s first book, Drown, was published in 1996, critics hailed the 28-year-old as a literary wunderkind. The collection of interconnected short stories chronicled the hardscrabble lives of Dominican immigrants making a life for themselves in the gritty urban landscape of northern New Jersey. The San Francisco Chronicle called the collection “stunning…a frontline report on the ambivalent promise of the American dream,” and Newsweek wrote that Diaz has the “dispassionate eye of a journalist and the tongue of a poet.”

The collection became a best seller, and it introduced Yunior de las Cassas, the tough, street-smart storyteller often described as Diaz’s literary alter ego. Like Yunior, the author immigrated to the United States from the Dominican Republic as a child and was raised by a single mother in a poor household. And like Yunior, Diaz is a fan of science fiction. The character pops up again as the narrator in the author’s novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and even more prominently in his most recent book of short stories, This Is How You Lose Her.

Diaz’s writing—sharply observed, by turns heartbreaking and funny, and frequently profane—has earned him a string of honors. Oscar Wao, his best-known work, won both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Critics Circle Award. Diaz is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation genius grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

This year’s Ha Jin Visiting Lecturer, the author will read from his work tonight at the BU Law Auditorium at the annual event sponsored by the Creative Writing Program. Prize-winning author Jin, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of creative writing, describes Diaz as “one of the best fiction writers working in North America,” adding that “his fiction is resonant and exciting partly because he writes about the immigrant experience, cultural clashes, and political oppression, which are themes of our time.”

If Drown put Diaz on the literary map, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao cemented his reputation as one of the most original voices in contemporary literature. The novel is about Oscar D’León, who is seven when we first meet him and being raised by his single mother, Beli. Oscar is an overweight nerd obsessed by science fiction, anime, and girls (the source of much of his later anguish), and his family history unfolds as the novel fluidly cuts back and forth between the Dominican Republic and New Jersey, hopscotching across decades. New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani described it as “Mario Vargas Llosa meets Star Trek meets David Foster Wallace meets Kanye West.” What begins as one family’s history becomes, in Diaz’s virtuosic prose, a probing examination of the Dominican diaspora and of violence—both familial and political. The book’s footnotes offer readers a fascinating primer on life in the Dominican Republic under one of the 20th century’s most ruthless dictators, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina.

If Yunior is a minor character in Oscar Wao, he is the undisputed star of This Is How You Lose Her. The short stories detail Yunior’s serial infidelity and his struggles to take some responsibility for his actions and become a man. Peppered with Diaz’s trademark combination of Spanglish and profanity, the book again touches on the ways the past—and family history—inform the people we become.

Bostonia spoke recently with Diaz, a professor of writing at MIT, about writing, the pull Yunior continues to exert on his imagination, his thoughts on the current public debate about immigration, and his advice for young writers.

Bostonia: I read that you never intended to write about the Dominican diaspora, yet you return to it again and again in your fiction. Why has it been such a fertile subject for you?

Diaz: This is what really interests me—a million plus people losing one world and finding another. Hard to resist. As a participant and a witness of this violent, confusing dislocation, my attempts to understand it are attempts to understand my family.

The vivid character of Yunior de las Casas appears in each of your books. What about him do you find so compelling, and do you imagine ever saying I’m done with this guy or will he continue to turn up in your fiction?

You are kind to say so. He’s not very voluble as a character. Some people have alter egos that can go on and on. Not Yunior. Very reticent. Doesn’t say nearly as much as I, as a writer, would like him to. As for his future, one never knows. Inspiration is a tricky affair—where it will lead is hard to predict. I have a sense that there are more Yunior stories to write, but all of us have plans—doesn’t mean the universe doesn’t have its own plans for us and those always come first, it seems.

You’ve spoken about your difficulties writing. At one point you said you despaired of ever completing This Is How You Lose Her.

I find writing to be unbearable. I haven’t written much since Oscar Wao. Don’t know what it is. But it just is. Nothing more boring than writers talking about their difficulties. I wish I could write more but I don’t, and there doesn’t seem to be much to be done about it. So I just read. And hope that will lead the way.

Do you revise your writing continuously?

I revise quite a bit. But once a piece is done, I’m more than fine letting it go. I’ve read enough that my instincts are good when it comes to determining what’s done and what looks done. Helps that I often spend years with a story before it sees the light of day.

Your fiction is often centered on the immigrant experience, a subject much in the news of late, here and abroad. With all the political rhetoric on the subject in the United States, are you optimistic that we can create a fair immigration policy?

Had you asked me a few years ago about the possibility of gay marriage, I would have been pessimistic, and look how fast things have changed. Unfortunately for those of us who care about this issue, immigration is closely tied to the country’s xenophobic reactive nationalism—a nationalism that ain’t going away anytime soon—and the “issue of immigration” continues to be a useful wedge for conservative politicians and political figures. And yet there are so many people on the ground fighting the good fight for immigrant rights, laboring and organizing ceaselessly to bring sense and humanity to this issue. In the long term, change is inevitable. The only fear is that our country’s immigrant-hate will get a lot worse before it gets better.

There’s no question that as a nation, our priorities are scrambled, our sense of what afflicts us is deranged. We get enraged at immigrants, will fear and afflict them, when it is clear by nearly all metrics that immigrants of every type are a boon to the country. So what are these nativist nationalist paroxysms allowing us to avoid? What are we not seeing when we incorrectly double down on xenophobia, on racial hatred against Latinos and immigrants? Primarily the crimes of our elite sectors and the malfeasance of our political classes and the vicious inequalities of the neoliberal order, its horrifying intrusion into every inch of our lives and minds.

As a short story writer and a novelist, do you prefer one genre over the other?

I have to tell you, I prefer the novel. The short story form is too exacting. For me at least, the short story requires too much work for too few pages. The novel is more forgiving, seems to thrive off a certain amount of human imperfection. When I write stories, it’s like designing a house. The pieces better fit exactly. When I wrote my novel, it was more like laying out a park. So what if the trees didn’t perfectly align? The effect was still powerful. If it was up to me, I’d only write novels, but like I said: inspiration is a tricky thing.

So much of your fiction touches on themes of love and longing, sex and infidelity. What keeps drawing you to these subjects?

Love reveals us like almost nothing else. Intimacy is our most fundamental need as human beings—our desire for it, our fear of it drives so much of what we do. As a kid, I was drawn to its power, perplexed by it. Its mysteries unite genders and races and sexualities and classes and bodies and immigration statuses—it’s the first and the original language of humankind. And besides, there were a lot of novellas going on in my family apartment growing up, so I learned a lot about love plots from watching them.

As a professor of writing, what advice do you give your students?

A relationship to art is essential to any kind of education.

What is the most common mistake that young writers make?

They approach writing as a major, as an occupation that can be mastered like dentistry. It certainly can, but that’s not the kind of writing I’m interested in reading. All the contemporary writers I adore first lived in the world roughly, wildly, fully before deciding if they had anything to say as an artist. A relationship with the world outside of school tends to precede good art.

Do your many awards, including a Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur Foundation genius grant, make it easier to forge a literary career?

Accolades are wonderful for “careers.” They don’t do a damn thing for your art. That happens in a space where there is no applause. But ever since I got these things, my books have sold well, I get invited to all sorts of festivals, I meet people I would never have met. It’s been swell, generally. But I’m not really sure that it’s done anything to make me a better writer. But what do I know? I tend to be more suspicious of these things than other people.

There are rumors that you are currently at work on a science fiction project. Is that true?

I grew up reading and loving sci-fi, horror, fantasy. And I’ve tried a couple of time to write in these genres—to no avail. I wish I was working on anything right now, but I’m not. I did try a few years back to write something a little more SF, but that didn’t really work. But hey, there’s always tomorrow. One never knows what the future will bring.

You founded the nonprofit VONA, Voices of Our Nation Arts, 16 years ago. What are the program’s goals?

Voices is a programmatic alternative to the traditional MFA/creative writing classroom, where the concerns and genius of people of color are decentered, marginalized, and occasionally met with hostility. Voices is a safe space for writers of color, first and foremost. Anyone who knows anything about our literary mainstream knows that it is not, and has not been, a real safe space for folks of color. That’s the logic behind Voices. The reality is I wanted to do something for young writers of color that I didn’t get to experience. I wanted to help create institutions that would abet people of color genius, that would give tools and space and mentorship for communities that don’t always get them, and above all else, I wanted to help create a space where communities of color could come together and talk and learn in formations that are not always available to them. To see Asian-American writers and US Latino writers and First Nation writers and African American writers dialoguing, that’s my vision of the future of US literature, and something I wanted to help create a space for.

Junot Diaz, this year’s Ha Jin Visiting Lecturer, will read from his first collection of short stories, Drown, tonight, Monday, October 26, at 7 p.m., at the BU Law Auditorium, 765 Commonwealth Ave. The event is free and open to the public and will be followed by a question-and-answer session and book signing. Guests should arrive early to be sure of a seat.

The Ha Jin Visiting Lecture series, made possible by a gift from BU trustee Robert J. Hildreth, brings internationally renowned fiction writers to BU to teach master classes and give public lectures. The series is named for award-winning novelist Ha Jin, a CAS professor of creative writing, who attended the Creative Writing Program.