At the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from the impoverished village of Croix-des-Rosets to New York to be reunited with her mother, where she gains a legacy of shame that only be healed when she returns to Haiti, to the woman who first reared her.

In Haiti during the dictatorial 1960s, the man known as the "dew breaker" was a torturer. Now an American and a fixture in his Brooklyn neighborhood, he maintains a quiet life as a husband and father. His terrible deeds lie buried. As we meet his family, neighbors, and even his past victims, his story becomes one of reconciliation and rebellion. And as we return one final time to his turbulent past, we witness his last violent act, and his first encounter...

Danticat came to think of her uncle Joseph, a charismatic pastor, as her "second father" when she was placed in his care at age four when her parents left Haiti for America. So she experiences a jumble of emotions when, at twelve, she joins her parents in New York City, whom she struggles to remember--she has left behind Joseph and the only home she's ever known. The story of a new life in a new country while fearing for those still in Haiti soon...

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.

Discusses how to write about death using the author's personal account of her mother's loss and such literary examples as Toni Morrison's "Sula" and Gabriel García Márquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude."

Beginning in 1490, Anacaona keeps a record of her life as a possible successor to the supreme chief of Xaragua, as wife of the chief of Maguana, and as a warrior battling the first white men to arrive in the West Indies, ravenous for gold.

"In this deeply personal book, the celebrated Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat reflects on art and exile. Inspired by Albert Camus and adapting her own lectures for Princeton University's Toni Morrison Lecture Series, Danticat tells stories of artists who create despite (or because of) the horrors that drove them from their homelands. Combining memoir and essay, these moving and eloquent pieces examine what it means to be an artist from a...

A curator and writer, drawing on her extensive collection of historical and contemporary photos, presents this unprecedented visual history of African women across centuries.