Edwidge Danticat

Edwidge Danticat was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1969 and moved to the United States when she was twelve. She majored in French literature at Barnard College and received a Master’s in creative writing from Brown University. Her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, was published in 1994, and a collection of stories, Krik? Krak!, in 1995. She was selected by Granta in 1996 as one of The Best Young American Novelists. In 1998 she published a novel, The Farming of the Bones, which received an American Book Award. This was followed in 2004 by The Dew Breaker, a novel-in-stories, and a memoir Brother I’m Dying, in 2007, which won the National Critics Circle Award. In 2009 she was awarded a MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant.

Her most recent book is Create Dangerously (2010), a collection of essays; she also edited Haiti Noir, a collection of stories to be published in 2011.