(Danticat, Edwidge) Edwidge Danticat was born in Haiti in 1969 and came to the United States when she was twelve years old. She graduated from Barnard College and received an M.F.A. from Brown University. Following her auspicious debut, the novel Breath, Eyes, Memory (and Oprah’s Book Club selection), Danticat has gone on to author and edit many acclaimed and award-winning works of fiction and nonfiction, including Krik? Krak! (a National Book Award finalist) The Farming of Bones (an American Book Award winner) Behind the Mountains, The Dew Breaker, Claire of the Sea Light and Brother, I’m Dying, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and a winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. She has also written several young adult novels and a travel narrative, After the Dance, A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel. Her memoir, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story (Graywolf Press) is at once a personal account of her mother dying from cancer and a deeply considered reckoning with the ways that other writers have approached death in their own work. Danticat is also a contributor to Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art from Trauma (Beacon Press), in which some of the country’s most admired authors describe their treks through dark memories and attest to the healing power of putting words to experience. She also provides the foreword to the newly published English translation of the novel Hadriana in All My Dreams (Akashic), by René Depestre, one of the most important voices of Haitian literature.
