ABSTRACT

The author begins the teaching of Junot Diaz by providing my students with biographical context. He was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic on December 31, 1968. Diaz currently serves as fiction editor atthe Boston Review, and he is a co-founder of the Voices of Our Nation Workshop, a program building community and excellence among emergent writers of color. An instructor would serve students well by elaborating on these two literary forms in multimedia lectures, offering definitions and histories of major contributions and innovations to these subgenres before turning to related discussion questions applied to Drown. This Is How You Lose Her, as the third and latest of Diaz's books, is so contingent on the prior two that it is the least desirable to teach on its own if one is pressed to choose one Diaz book for a syllabus. However, this also makes it the best book to use to illustrate single-author intertextuality.