University of the Virgin Islands site features this page on Caribbean writers. It includes the e-text of Danticat's biographical essay "We Are Ugly, But We Are Here."

BIOGRAPHY
Edwidge Danticat (b. 1969) was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. When she was two years old, her father immigrated to the United States to look for work. Two years later her mother followed him, leaving Danticat and her younger brother in the care of their uncle, who was a minister. Danticat remembers her childhood fascination with the ritual of storytelling conducted by her aunt's grandmother in Haiti.

At the age of twelve, Danticat joined her parents in Brooklyn, where she began to learn English (the family still speaks Creole at home). Within a year she was writing articles for her high school newspaper, New Youth Connections. She majored in French literature at Barnard College, graduating in 1990, and went on to study in the MFA program in creative writing at Brown University on a full scholarship. While still a graduate student she sold the manuscript of her first book, Breath, Eyes, Memory, to Soho, a small press she discovered in Writer's Digest.

Published in 1994, the novel dramatized a young Haitian woman's coming of age in a troubled mother-daughter relationship and was chosen by Oprah Winfrey for the June 18, 1994, "meeting" of her television book club. With this endorsement, Breath, Eyes, Memory became a paperback best seller. The next year Danticat published Krik?Krak!, a collection of stories that was nominated for a National Book Award. The Farming of Bones, her third book, published by Soho in 1998, describes the 1937 massacre on the Haitian-Dominican border. Danticat now works with the National Coalition for Haitian Rights on a three-year grant from the Lila Acheson Wallace Foundation.