Edwidge Danticat Discusses We’re Alone with Nicole Dennis-Benn

Tracing a loose arc from Edwidge Danticat’s childhood to the COVID-19 pandemic and recent events in Haiti, the essays gathered in We’re Alone include personal narrative, reportage, and tributes to mentors and heroes such as Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Gabriel García Márquez, and James Baldwin that explore several abiding themes: environmental catastrophe, the traumas of colonialism, motherhood, and the complexities of resilience.

From hurricanes to political violence, from her days as a new student at a Brooklyn elementary school knowing little English to her account of a shooting hoax at a Miami mall, Danticat has an extraordinary ability to move from the personal to the global and back again. Throughout, literature and art prove to be her reliable companions and guides through both tragedies and triumphs.

Danticat is an irresistible presence on the page: full of heart, outrage, humor, clear thinking, and moral questioning, while reminding us of the possibilities of community. We’re Alone is a book that asks us to think through some of the world’s intractable problems while deepening our understanding of one of the most significant novelists at work today.

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PARTICIPANTS

Edwidge Danticat is the author of We’re Alone, Everything Inside, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction, and The Art of Death, a National Book Critics Award finalist in criticism. She lives in New York and teaches at Columbia University.

 

 

Nicole Dennis-Benn is an award-winning novelist whose books place working class Jamaicans, especially women, at the center of the universal human experience. Her debut novel, Here Comes the Sun, a New York Times Notable Book of 2016 and most recently, listed as a New York Times Most Notable Book of the decade, follows the lives of four women living in a fictional community in Montego Bay and explores timely themes of generational trauma, colorism, gender, class, and sexuality. Her second novel, Patsy, a Today Show Read with Jenna Book Club Pick and a New York Times Editor’s Choice, explores the lives of a mother and daughter grappling with immigration and identity. Patsy has been named best book of the year by TIME, Oprah Magazine, People Magazine, NPR, The Guardian, Apple Books, among others. Dennis-Benn was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, Pen/Faulkner Award in Fiction, and a two-time winner of the Lambda Literary Award Fiction Prize. NPR has called Dennis-Benn an indispensable novelist whereas Time Magazine has described her stories as filling a literary void. Her novels have been translated to multiple languages, including French, Portuguese, Korean, German and Italian, and are sold all over the globe.

While Dennis-Benn currently lives in NYC with her wife and two young sons, Jamaica is her muse. Dennis-Benn was born and raised in Vineyard Town, Kingston, and is a graduate of St. Andrew High School for Girls. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Biology from Cornell University, Master of Public Health from the University of Michigan, and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She has been a distinguished visiting faculty at Princeton University, NYU, Queens College, City College of New York, Bryn Mawr College, among others. She regularly mentors emerging writers, with an emphasis on those from the Caribbean, through the Stuyvesant Writing Workshop, for which she is the Founding Director.