Edwidge Danticat

Harvard Book Store, Cambridge Forum, and the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research are thrilled to welcome critically acclaimed Haitian American author EDWIDGE DANTICAT as she discusses her new book, Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work, a combination of memoir, biography.

In Create Dangerously, Edwidge Danticat reflects on art and exile, examining what it means to be an immigrant artist from a country in crisis. Inspired by Albert Camus’ lecture, "Create Dangerously," Danticat tells the stories of artists, including herself, who create despite, or because of, the horrors that drove them from their homelands and that continue to haunt them. Danticat eulogizes an aunt who guarded her family’s homestead in the Haitian countryside, a cousin who died of AIDS while living in Miami as an undocumented alien, and a renowned Haitian radio journalist whose political assassination shocked the world. Danticat writes about the Haitian novelists she first read as a girl at the Brooklyn Public Library, a woman mutilated in a machete attack who became a public witness against torture, and the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat and other artists of Haitian descent. Danticat also suggests that the aftermaths of natural disasters in Haiti and the United States reveal that the countries are not as different as many Americans might like to believe.

"In Danticat’s many remarkable stories and pensées from the gut, one locates the inimitable power of truth.... Danticat documents what it means for an immigrant writer to create dangerously for immigrant readers who read dangerously, awakened and no longer participants in a culture of ’historical amnesia.’" —Publishers Weekly (starred)