Jaquira Díaz was born in Puerto Rico into a family that lived in the Puerto Rican housing projects, colloquially referred to as el caserío. The neighborhood was made up of government housing, and had something of a dangerous reputation. Díaz, in an interview she gave to Origins, tells stories of being menaced by a machete-armed man, and of raids by the local Police force, referred to as los camarones. When she was older, her family moved to Miami. Growing up in Miami Beach during what she describes as the city's "urban blight," she had a difficult life, marked by drug use, attempts at suicide, and encounters with the law. Díaz contributes some of her identity issues to being what she describes as "a closeted queer girl" in a neighborhood where gay people were harassed and attacked. Another issue was the family's financial situation. Her father, who had studied at the University of Puerto Rico and whom she describes as a lover of poetry and literature, became a drug dealer in order to support the family. As she grew older, writing continued to be an important outlet for her, and her writing developed a semi-autobiographical character, often dealing with suicide, drug use, and identity.
Career
Díaz's fiction and essays, which are predominantly set in Puerto Rico and Miami, have been described as "lyrical" and "urgent" and are often focused on the intensely personal tragedies and triumphs of young women maturing in a dangerous world. In addition to her literary writing, Díaz writes about crime, politics, sexuality, race, music, and culture, and has been described as an elegant prose stylist. In 2017, Los Angeles Times critic Walton Muyumba listed Díaz as "part of a necessary cipher of extremely gifted freestylers" that includes writers Ta-Nehisi Coates, Isabel Wilkerson, Carol Anderson, Claudia Rankine, Terrance Hayes, Kiese Laymon, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Junot Díaz, and Jelani Cobb, and she was listed among Remezcla's "15 Latinx Music Journalists You Should be Reading" and was included in NPR's Alt.Latino's Favorites: The Songs of 2017, as one of "the cream of the crop of Latinx music writers." In 2018, Electric Literature's Ivelisse Rodriguez named her among the writers who "are changing the topography of Puerto Rican literature," describing Díaz's essays as being "about the awakening of sexual desire and the sexual threat all women experience." Díaz holds a B.A. from the University of Central Florida and an M.F.A. from the University of South Florida, and has been the recipient of fellowships from The Kenyon Review, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the Ragdale Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The MacDowell Colony, the Tin House Summer Writers' Workshop, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference, as well as an NEA Distinguished Fellowship from the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences. In May 2018, Díaz announced that she had signed a two-book deal with Algonquin Books; the first book, Ordinary Girls, a memoir, will be published by Algonquin on October 29, 2019, and will explore themes of girlhood in a dangerous world, and coming of age in the projects of Puerto Rico and the streets of Miami. The second book, I am Deliberate, will be a novel.
Selected works
;Memoirs
Ordinary Girls
;Essays
in The Kenyon Review and The Best American Essays 2016
"Girl Hood: On Finding Yourself in Books" in Her Kind, reprinted in Waveform: Twenty-first Century Essays by Women
in The Sun
in Brevity and in Pushcart Prize XLII: Best of the Small Presses
