Junot Díaz Has Been Accused Of Forcibly Kissing Writer Zinzi Clemmons

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Acclaimed author Junot Díaz was publicly accused of forcibly kissing author Zinzi Clemmons, who confronted him in front of a stunned crowd at a writers’ festival in Australia on Friday, a person who was in the room told BuzzFeed News.

Clemmons later detailed the allegation on her Twitter account.

“As a grad student, I invited Junot Díaz to speak to a workshop on issues of representation in literature. I was an unknown wide-eyed 26 yo, and he used it as an opportunity to corner and forcibly kiss me. I'm far from the only one he's done this 2, I refuse to be silent anymore,” she wrote.

Representatives for Díaz have not responded to several requests for comment.

Díaz, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, was speaking at the “Why We Read” panel at the Sydney Writers Festival.

In the question-and-answer segment, Clemmons, who was not part of that specific panel but is a featured speaker at other festival events, stood up and said Díaz had “harmed” her, the person told BuzzFeed News.

The attendee said the crowd was silent while Clemmons emotionally detailed her accusation against Díaz.

Clemmons framed her comments around Díaz’s recent New Yorker piece, The Silence: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma, where he revealed being sexually assaulted as a child. Clemmons asked why he didn’t examine more in his writing about how he had hurt others in that manner.

The attendee said that Díaz responded to her comments about his writing.

Another attendee posted on Instagram alluding to the confrontation: “a female decided to take question time to an uncomfortable place and was quite rude and I would like to commend Junot Díaz for the way he handle it.”

After the panel, Clemmons, author of the novel What We Lose, posted on Twitter about her experience with Díaz, and said she had avoided literary events because of it.

According to her LinkedIn, Clemmons completed a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at Columbia University in 2013.

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