Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work »

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.

"This is the most powerful book I've read in years. Though delicate in its prose and civil in its tone, it hits like a freight train. It's a call to arms for all immigrants, all artists, all those who choose to bear witness, and all those who choose to listen. And 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

"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

Create Dangerously is an intelligent and passionate book on the role of the immigrant artist. As in her fiction, the lucidity and humility of Edwidge Danticat's prose has a quiet force. This book is as much a testimonial to the spirit of resistance and defiance as it is an elegy for those who have died and disappeared; it is as much a provocation to the artist as it is a book of mourning."--Saidiya V. Hartman, author of Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

The Barnes & Noble Review

In Danticat's [work], there is no doubt about Haiti's centrality: her novel Breath, Eyes, Memory is "the story of three generations of Haitian women." Yet when the book was selected for Oprah's Book Club and reached a huge audience, Danticat found that some Haitian Americans were offended by its portrayal of their culture -- especially the practice of "testing," in which a mother would manually confirm her daughter's virginity. "You dishonor us, making us sexual and psychological misfits," one woman wrote to Danticat; she overheard a man asking bitterly, "Why was she taught to read and write?" The best answer she can give is the phrase of Camus's that provides the title of this thoughtful, powerful book. "Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. This is what I've always thought it meant to be a writer."

CHAPTER 1: Create Dangerously: Th e Immigrant Artist at Work 1
CHAPTER 2: Walk Straight 21
CHAPTER 3: I Am Not a Journalist 41
CHAPTER 4: Daughters of Memory 59
CHAPTER 5: I Speak Out 73
CHAPTER 6: The Other Side of the Water 87
CHAPTER 7: Bicentennial 97
CHAPTER 8: Another Country 107
CHAPTER 9: Flying Home 115
CHAPTER 10: Welcoming Ghosts 127
CHAPTER 11: Acheiropoietos 137
CHAPTER 12: Our Guernica 153
Acknowledgments 175
Notes 177
Index 183