Junot Diaz

He won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, but Diaz tells Kurt that many of the students he teaches at MIT don’t even know that he’s a writer. And he likes it that way. “If you want people just to like you,” says Diaz, “there’s a thousand other careers for that.”

Video: How writing a book transforms its author