Edwidge Danticat

"At the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from her impoverished Haitian village to New York to be reunited with a mother she barely remembers. There she discovers secrets that no child should ever know, and a legacy of shame that can be healed only when she returns to Haiti--to the women who first reared her. What ensues is a passionate journey through a landscape charged with the supernatural and scarred by political violence. In her stunning literary...

From the age of four, award-winning writer Edwidge Danticat came to think of her uncle Joseph as her "second father," when she was placed in his care after her parents left Haiti for America. And so she was both elated and saddened when, at twelve, she joined her parents and youngest brothers in New York City. As Edwidge made a life in a new country, adjusting to being far away from so many who she loved, she and her family continued to fear for the...

A moving reflection on a subject that touches us all, by the bestselling author of Claire of the Sea Light Edwidge Danticat's The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story 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. "Writing has been the primary way I have tried to make sense of my losses," Danticat notes in her introduction. "I...

It is 1937 and Amabelle Desir, a young Haitian woman living in the Dominican Republic, has built herself a life as the servant and companion of the wife of a wealthy colonel. She and Sebastien, a cane worker, are deeply in love and plan to marry. But Amabelle's world collapses when a wave of genocidal violence, driven by Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, leads to the slaughter of Haitian workers. Amabelle and Sebastien are separated, and she desperately...

When Saya's mother is sent to jail as an illegal immigrant, she sends her daughter a cassette tape with a song and a bedtime story, which inspires Saya to write a story of her own--one that just might bring her mother home.

A curator and writer, drawing on her extensive collection of historical and contemporary photos, presents this unprecedented visual history of African women across centuries. McKinley draws on her extensive collection of historical and contemporary photos to present a visual history of African women across centuries. These images tell how deeply cosmopolitan and modern they are in their style; how they were able to reclaim the tools of the colonial...

Written over the course of twenty-one years and published in 1966, Wide Sargasso Sea, based on Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, takes place in Jamaica and Dominica in 1839-45. Textual notes illuminate the novel's historical background, regional references, and the non-translated Creole and French phrases necessary to fully understand this powerful story. Backgrounds include a wealth of material on the novel's long evolution, its connections to Jane...

Presents a collection of short stories originally commissioned by "The New York Times Magazine" as the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world, from twenty-nine authors including Margaret Atwood, Tommy Orange, Edwidge Danticat, and more, in a project inspired by Boccaccio's "The Decameron."