LIVE from the NYPL: Edwidge Danticat

In CREATE DANGEROUSLY: The Immigrant Artist at Work, Edwidge Danticat draws on her Haitian background, experiences as an author and comments from colleagues in art, literature, photography, and journalism, to address these and other important questions:

• What is it to be an artist?
• What is it to be an immigrant?
• What is it to be both—working outside of your homeland and creating art, literature, film, photography that strives to bring specific truths to the world?
• What is it to be simultaneously celebrated for drawing attention to human rights issues and vilified for revealing the worst about your homeland?

Edwidge will be joined in conversation by Paul Holdengräber, Director of LIVE from the NYPL.

EDWIDGE DANTICAT was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 1969.  At a young age, Danticat's parents emigrated to New York and she stayed in Haiti with her aunt. It was during this time that she was influenced by the Haitian practice of story telling. At the age of twelve, Danticat joined her parents in Brooklyn. She received a BA in French literature from Barnard College and an MFA at Brown University, where she wrote Breath, Eyes, Memory, a novel that speaks of four generations of Haitian women who must overcome poverty and powerlessness. At the age of twenty-six, in 1995, she became a finalist for the National Book Award for Krik? Krak! She received the 1995 Pushcart Short Story Prize and fiction awards from The Carribean Writer, Seventeen, and Essence magazines. Drawing on her experiences as a Haitian-American she writes of one of the most under-represented cultures in American literature using a style which is both poetic and passionate.  Danticat's books include Breath, Eyes, Memory, Krik? Krak!, and The Farming of Bones.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER is the Director of LIVE from the NYPL.

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