Lannan Foundation

Edwidge Danticat is the author of several books, including Krik? Krak!, a collection of short stories that encompass both the cruelties and the high ideals of Haitian life. Danitcat's latest novel, The Dew Breaker, spins a series of related stories around a shadowy central figure, a Haitian immigrant to the U.S. who reveals to his artist daughter that he is not, as she believes, a prison escapee, but a former prison guard and skilled torturer. When asked about being a role model for her country she replied, "There are millions and millions of Haitian voices. Mine is only one. My greatest hope is that mine becomes one voice in a giant chorus that is trying to understand and express artistically what it's like to be a Haitian immigrant in the United States." Danticat was born in Haiti and moved to the United States when she was twelve. She lives in Miami with her husband and daughter.

Edwidge Danticat Bio and Cross Links

Junot Díaz is the author of Drown, a collection of ten stories that move from the barrios of the Dominican Republic to the struggling urban communities of New Jersey. His recent novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, described by The New York Times as "a wondrous, not-so-brief first novel that is so original it can only be described as Mario Vargas Llosa meets Star Trek meets David Foster Wallace meets Kanye West." His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, African Voices, and four volumes of Best American Short Stories. On language and writing he has said, "I have a sense of the Dominican…it's not much of a theory, more a collection of words, a dot dot dash code that I use to […] decipher a larger code, which is the Dominican experience, the Dominican diasporic experience, and the American experience, all hooked together. I always lived in a situation of simultaneity." His many awards and honors include a Guggenheim fellowship, the National Book Critics Circle Award for best novel of 2007, and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Díaz is the fiction editor at the Boston Review and an associate professor in Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Junot Díaz Bio and Cross Links