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I’m just one.” Danticat lives in New York where she teaches creative writing at New York University. As she told New York Times reporter Garry Pierre-Pierre, “I don’t really see myself as the voice for the Haitian-American experience.
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It is a role that makes the young author uncomfortable. Due to the fact that Danticat’s writing has thus far focused on the experiences of Haitians and Haitian-Americans, some have begun to see her as a spokesperson for that community. In her short career, Danticat has been praised for her lyrical prose and has been compared to Alice Walker, the author of The Color Purple.
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The collection was nominated for the National Book Award, and the author was named one of the best young American novelists by Granta magazine the following year. Krik? Krak!, the collection of short stories which includes “Children of the Sea” appeared in 1995 to similar acclaim. Breath, Eyes, Memory served as her master’s thesis and was received warmly by the critics. in creative writing from Brown University in 1993. She attended Barnard College in New York City, receiving her B.A. As a teenager, she began writing the novel Breath, Eyes, Memory, which became her first published work in 1994.ĭanticat’s parents wanted their daughter to become a nurse and sent her to a specialized high school in New York City, but by the time she graduated she had decided to concentrate on writing. She felt somewhat like an outsider at school, and she took refuge in her isolation by writing about her homeland. She rejoined them in 1981, and the family settled in Brooklyn, New York. Four years later her parents immigrated to the United States, leaving their young daughter behind. Danticat was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital city, on January 19, 1969. Author Biographyīrought up in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, Edwidge Danticat has had firsthand experience with many of the harrowing events she relates in her stories. Through this technique, Danticat demonstrates the danger inherent in any choice a Haitian makes, whether it involves standing up to the governmentĪnd trying to gain political asylum in the United States, or complying with the regime’s demands even if it means betraying others through silence. Written in the alternating viewpoints of the young man and woman, the reader experiences the situation from both characters’ perspectives. “Children of the Sea” has been commended for the way in which it blends political concerns with the emotional lives of the characters, thereby putting a human face on the suffering that many Westerners have only read about in the newspapers. The story was inspired by the author’s conversations with “ boat people,” as the refugees are sometimes known, who had made their way to Providence, Massachusetts. The tragic story, which concerns a doomed fate of a young couple, concerns many of the issues Danticat addresses in her other stories and in her novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, which was published in 1994.Ī native of Haiti, Danticat writes almost exclusively about the country’s people, particularly its women, who during the 1980s suffered at the hands of a dictator, Papa Doc Duvalier, as well as from poverty and violence.
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First published in the October, 1993, issue of Short Fiction by Women under the title “From the Ocean Floor,” “Children of the Sea” was also included in Edwidge Danticat’s 1995 short story collection Krik? Krak! The story of a young couple separated by political strife in Haiti, it received positive attention from critics as did the book, and the author quickly gained a reputation as one of the most promising writers in the United States.
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