Edwidge Danticat
In 1969, Edwidge Danticat was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and would go on to receive the MacArthur Fellows Program fellowship, one of several formal distinctions that mark her career as a writer. She holds citizenship in both Haiti and the United States and works in English across multiple literary forms, including the novel, the short story, and children's writing.
Danticat attended Clara Barton High School before pursuing higher education at Barnard College, Brown University, and the University of the West Indies. Alongside her writing practice, she has worked as a university teacher. Her work as a novelist, short story writer, and children's writer reflects a range of literary registers and intended readerships.
Formal recognition of her writing has come through several awards. She received the Langston Hughes Medal, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and a fellowship through the MacArthur Fellows Program. The conferral of these distinctions across her career represents concrete institutional acknowledgment of her work as a writer operating in multiple genres.
Quotes by Edwidge Danticat
Edwidge Danticat's insights on:
I think Haiti is a place that suffers so much from neglect that people only want to hear about it when It's at its extreme. And that's what they end up knowing about it.
We’ve had fiction from the time of cave drawings. I think fiction, storytelling, and narrative in general will always exist in some form.
Maybe the way death folds into the most private of spaces encourages us to underestimate the shattering weight of such a devastating loss. Perhaps uninterrupted routines and the daily flow of life force us to forget that losing a loved one to death is confounding, excruciating, sometimes even unbearable. That is, until it is our turn to grieve, and no matter how many people surround us, we end up, at one point or another, feeling totally alone.
Once you’re involved in the work, it’s really just you and the characters and the words.
Even when I think of writing fiction, it’s being kind of a liar, a storyteller, a weaver, and there’s that sense of how much of this is your life. The story is a way you unravel your life from behind a mask.
They say a girl becomes a woman when she loses her mother. You, child, were born a woman.
My mother used to say that we’ll all have three death: the one when our breath leaves our bodies to rejoin the air, the one when we are out back in the earth, and the one that will erase us completely and no one will remember us at all.
We are all bodies, but the dying body starts decaying right before our eyes. And those narratives that tell us what it’s like to live, and die, inside those bodies are helpful to all of us, because no matter how old we are, our bodies never stop being mysterious to us.