Edwidge Danticat

Edwidge Danticat, (born January 19, 1969, Haiti), Haitian American author whose works focus on the lives of women and their relationships. She also addressed issues of power, injustice, and poverty.

By the time she was four years old, her mother and father had moved to the United States, leaving Danticat and her brother behind with an aunt and uncle. She joined her parents in 1981, but, with her Creole language and Haitian dress and manners, she found adapting to life and school in the United States difficult. Partly as a way to escape these unpleasant situations, she wrote stories, a practice she had started at an early age.

Although her parents had hoped that she would have a career in medicine, Danticat graduated from Barnard College in New York City in 1990 with a B.A. in French literature. She worked briefly as a secretary and then in 1993 received an M.F.A. degree from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Her master’s thesis, a partly autobiographical account of the relationships between several generations of Haitian women, was published as Breath, Eyes, Memory in 1994. The following year Krik? Krak!, a collection of short stories, was published. The collection, which took its title from a call-and-response phrase common in Haitian storytelling, was a finalist for the National Book Award.