In "Drown" and "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" Diaz tells stories of immigrants, ghetto nerds, overworked fathers and virgin Casanovas almost exclusively from two locales: his exotic memories of the Dominican Republic and the bleak inner suburbs of New Jersey (with occasional side trips to Washington Heights). He says he has never written about Boston.

The 39-year-old acclaimed author, however, teaches at MIT, lives in Cambridge six months of the year and credits the area with giving him "the quiet and the resources and the exile" he needed to finish his debut novel, "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction this year.

Diaz said he moved to Cambridge in January 2003 "with only pieces of a novel." Five years later, he's a rock star in the literary world thanks to the sentences he builds in his head (and sometimes writes on his hand).

On Nov. 22, Diaz will head to the VFW Dilboy Post on Summer Street to headline The Somerville News Writer's Festival. It's an anticipated neighborhood appearance for an author with worldwide prestige. The Somerville News spoke with Diaz, via email, this week about how a Dominican-born, Jersey-raised boy survives in Cambridge and Boston.

Somerville News: Why did you choose to teach at MIT and live in Cambridge?

Junot Diaz: Cambridge was an easy choice. It has the bookstores! I live about a hundred feet from Harvard Books. I'm a Jersey boy which means that I spent almost every day inside of a car growing up so can you imagine the pleasure it is for me just to walk places? Cambridge allows me to walk to work, to walk to eat, to walk everywhere. MIT recruited me in a way. Anita Desai, genius writer extraordinaire, really pushed for me to apply for the job and once I met the students and my colleagues in the program in writing it was a wrap. I didn't want to be anywhere else.

SN:Has living in Cambridge changed any of your previous perceptions of the area?

My best friends in this whole area are Dominican and Puerto Rican folks who grew up in and around Central Square, part of a people of color community that is vibrant and beautiful and almost entirely erased by the twin universities that dominate Cambridge. Never knew anything about this community until I moved to Cambridge.

SN:Do you think of Cambridge as a white city?

Cambridge is definitely a white city to me. For all its positive political activity, for all its diversity I don't see this radical bit of New England as very hospitable to poor folks of color. Look: it's not how individual folks of color are treated but how their COMMUNITIES are treated. And at a community level this is not the best place to be a poor kid of black and Latino descent. This is a hard thing to be anywhere but in Cambridge it's particularly frustrating. I live on Harvard Square, I see how well treated the tourists are and yet how the brown kids from Central Square get followed in stores, are stared at by people, are made to feel unwelcome in a thousand different ways. I see how Harvard and MIT both benefit from Cambridge and yet how Rindge and Latin, the only public high school in town, within a stone's throw of both institutions, languishes (despite the many sacrifices of its teachers.) I see how the public space of Cambridge is still white dominated. I've communicated these observations to Cambridge people and they're like: oh no! that's not true. It's never folks who live in a place all their lives who see its problems clearly. It's the outsiders. But if you don't believe the texture of my observations just look at the fact that neither Cambridge nor Boston does a good job of retaining blacks and Latinos who come to study in the local colleges at all! If that's not a sign that something is afoot I don't know what is. Cambridge has a lot of things going for it, a lot of beautiful progressive people, wonderful community organizations but in racial terms it ain't nowhere near as safe a space for me as New York City or New Jersey. Both these are super-messed up in so many ways but they don't suffer from New England whiteness. But just because I have criticisms of a place doesn't mean I don't appreciate all the things Cambridge/Boston does well. You level criticisms because you want a place to improve, not because you want to tear it down. It's those people who have no criticisms who I'm scared of. They're the ones who are happy with the status quo and unless your address is HEAVEN there is no status quo on our planet that I believe needs protecting.

SN:In the "Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" a Dominican-American family is haunted for generations by Fuku Americanus, the Curse and the Doom of the New World, first unleashed by the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola. Fuku haunts an entire world and repeatedly foils the dreams of its people. Did you ever witness Fuku around Boston?

Yes, it's called Fuk√∫ New Englandus. The whole area afflicted by a particularly nasty brand of white supremacy, of white exceptionalism, of white insularity that continuously haunts the area despite all pretensions to culture, to art, to diversity, to scholarship. Civil Rights and immigration never did fully arrive (penetrate for lack of a better word) and the place has suffered for it.

SN:When did you start writing on your hand?