Edwidge Danticat was born in 1969 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. When she was four years old, her parents immigrated to the United States and left her behind. She stayed in Haiti until 1981 when she joined her parents. The language and culture barriers made assimilation difficult for Danticat. She began to write stories as a way to deal with the difficult adjustment she was forced to make into American society.
While her parents hoped she would be a doctor, Danticat always tended toward the humanities. She graduated from Barnard College with a BA in French literature. In 1993, she received her MFA from Brown University. Her first book, Breath, Eyes, Memory, was her master’s thesis. It was...
