Fans of Edwidge Danticat (Brother, I’m Dying; Breath, Eyes Memory, Krik? Krak!) will discover even more to love in Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (Pub date: October 13, 2010) while newcomers will be inspired by this intensely personal, yet simultaneously universal book. Danticat draws on her Haitian background and experiences as an author, as well as comments from colleagues in art, literature, photography, and journalism, to answer important questions about the challenges faced by immigrant artists who are compelled to write about their homelands.
A moving chapter expands on an article Danticat wrote for The New Yorker following the earthquake in January 2010 in which she reflected upon the multiple roles she must occupy – mourning on a personal level for her cousin lost in the earthquake, while also communicating with a broad, international audience about a national tragedy.
This beautifully-written and inspirational book is based, in part, on lectures given as part of the Toni Morrison Lecture Series at Princeton University (video available on our web site). Danticat will also publish a picture book with Scholastic this fall called Eight Days about a child who survives the earthquake using his imagination. She continues to travel to Haiti and to advocate for international attention to and support of the rebuilding efforts there.
“Edwidge Danticat’s prose has a Chekhovian simplicity—an ability to state the most urgent truths in a measured and patiently plain style that gathers a luminous energy as it moves inexorably forward. In this book she makes a strong case that art, for immigrants from countries where human rights and even survival are often in jeopardy, must be a vocation to witness if it is not to be an idle luxury.”
—Madison Smartt Bell, author of Toussaint Louverture: A Biography
“This is the most powerful book I’ve read in years…Though it describes great upheaval, tragedy, and injustice, it’s full of humor, warmth, grace, and light.”
—Dave Eggers, author of Zeitoun and What Is the What
“Edwidge Danticat is a great literary artist. She is also a grand cultural critic whose wisdom and compassion loom large in this magnificent book.”
—Cornel West, Princeton University
About the Author:
Edwidge Danticat was born in Haiti in 1969 and moved to the United States when she was twelve. She is the author of two novels, two collections of stories, two books for young adults, and two nonfiction books, one of which, Brother, I’m Dying, was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. In 2009, she received a MacArthur Fellowship.
EDWIDGE DANTICAT encourages us to CREATE DANGEROUSLY in her first book published since the award-winning Brother, I’m Dying.
CREATE DANGEROUSLY
The Immigrant Artist at Work
Edwidge Danticat
Cloth | ISBN13: 978-0-691-14018-6 | $19.95 / £13.95
208 pp. | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2
Pub date: October 13, 2010
Contact:
In North America:
Contact: Jessica Pellien
Phone: (609) 258-7879
Fax: (609) 258-1335
In Europe, Africa & Middle East:
Contact: Caroline Priday
Phone: 1993-814-506
Fax: 1993-814-504
cpriday@pupress.co.uk
Photo of Edwidge Danticat: Nancy Crampton
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