After investigation, Pulitzer Prize board announces Junot Diaz will remain as a member
The Pulitzer Prize board announced Friday it has found no reason to remove its former chairman, author Junot Diaz, after reviewing the complaints of women writers who alleged mistreatment by him.
In a statement, the board said its five-month investigation, involving interviews with dozens of witnesses and analysis of hundreds of pages of documents, “did not find evidence warranting removal’’ of Diaz from the board.
“Accordingly,’’ the board wrote, “after full discussion and consideration by the members, professor Diaz will be welcomed to resume his full duties as a board member and to fulfill his term, which expires in April of 2019.’’
Diaz, a Pulitzer Prize winner who teaches writing at MIT, said Friday he’s pleased with the board’s decision.
“I welcomed the Pulitzer’s independent investigation and was heartened by its thoroughness and determination to run down every detail,’’ he said in a statement. “I am grateful the investigation found the truth. I look forward to returning to the Pulitzer’s important work.’’
Last spring, Diaz, a Cambridge resident who won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for his novel “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,’’ was accused of inappropriate behavior with women, including a claim he once “forcibly kissed’’ writer Zinzi Clemmons.
The decision of the Pulitzer Prize board echoes the findings of MIT, which cleared Diaz to resume teaching this fall. Similarly, the Boston Review decided to retain Diaz as its fiction editor after a “careful review of the public complaints’’ and interviews with “women writers of color in the world of literary fiction.’’
In an interview with the Globe in June, Diaz adamantly denied the allegations, saying he was “distressed,’’ “confused,’’ and “panicked’’ by the accusations and insisted he hadn’t bullied the women or been sexually inappropriate.
“I was shocked,’’ Diaz said. “I was, like, ‘Yo, this doesn’t sound like anything that’s in my life, anything that’s me.’ ’’
The 19-member Pulitzer Board is composed mainly of journalists and news executives, as well as five people from academia or the arts.
