Interview

Writers on the Record: Edwidge Danticat and Victoria Lautman

Brother, I'm Dying Writers on the Record with Victoria Lautman

ABOUT 

  • ABOUT Edwidge Danticat

    MacArthur Fellow Edwidge Danticat’s many books include the memoirs Brother, I’m Dying and After the Dance: A Walk through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti; the novels The Farming of Bones and Breath, Eyes, Memory; the story collections The Dewbreaker and Krik? Krak!; and two novels for young adults, Behind the Mountain and Anacaona: Golden Flower, Haiti, 1490.  Danticat earned her bachelor’s degree from Barnard College and an M.F.A. from Brown University.  She has taught creative writing at New York University and the University of Miami.

    Profile
  • ABOUT Victoria Lautman

    Victoria Lautman is the creator, host, and producer of the radio program Writers on the Record with Victoria Lautman, on the air since 2004. She was a featured interviewer, host, and contributor on Chicago Public Radio for twenty years. She has also appeared as a regular cultural correspondent for WTTW's Artbeat and on several other local television affiliates. Lautman is a contributing editor for Chicago Magazine and a blogger for the Huffington Post.

    Profile
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It’s not a 'me' moir. It’s like a 'nous' moir; it’s an 'us' moir.       

Journalist Victoria Lautman interviews Edwidge Danticat on her searing family memoir, Brother, I’m Dying (2007).  This is a book that ricochets from Port-au-Prince, Haiti to Brooklyn and bounces between the two most important men in the writers’ life: her father and his brother. When Danticat’s mother and father moved to the United States to pursue a better life for their children, Uncle Joseph devoted eight years to raising Danticat and her younger brother Bob before they could be reunited with their parents in New York. Joseph’s death in the custody of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security set this book in motion, but Danticat’s stories of her turbulent and evocative homeland are at the core of this narrative as in all her beloved bestsellers: Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994). Krik? Krak! (1995), The Farming of Bones, (1998), and The Dew Breaker (2004).

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