With

Julia Alvarez

Julia Alvarez and Edwidge Danticat Reading at Goucher College

Born in Port-au-Prince in 1969, at the height of the Duvalierist dictatorship in Haiti, Edwidge Danticat emigrated to the United States at the age of twelve. At fourteen, two years after she learned her first words of English, she began to publish her first work in that tongue, in New Youth Connections, New York City. Danticat's first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, appeared in 1994, when this prodigious author was barely 25; the novel was later selected for Oprah's Book Club. Krik-Krak, a collection of stories that appeared the following year, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1995. Her third novel, The Farming of Bones, which won the American Book Award in 1999, is based on an historical horror story: Dominican Republic dictator Trujillo's slaughter of thousands of Haitian cane cutters on the banks of the Massacre River in 1937.

Edwidge Danticat has her bachelor's degree from Barnard College, and a master's in creative writing from Brown University. In 1996 she was selected as one of "The Best of Young American Novelists" for a special issue of Granta Magazine; and in 1999 she was featured by the New Yorker in a special issue called "The Future of American Fiction." Her other books include the young-adult novel Behind the Mountains, and a nonfiction account of the annual Carnival in Jacmel: After the Dance. Recently married to Fedo Boyer, Danticat now lives in Miami. She returns often to Haiti, which has remained the source and the subject of most of her work.