Edwidge Danticat

Danticat was left in Haiti with an aunt and uncle at four when her parents went to New York, and joined them at twelve speaking Creole and very little English. Breath, Eyes, Memory was published when she was twenty-five. The Farming of Bones concerns the 1937 killing of Haitians on the Dominican border, which had almost no fiction written about it. Brother, I'm Dying tells what became of the uncle who raised her: at eighty-one he fled gang violence in Port-au-Prince, asked for asylum at Miami airport, was detained, had his medication taken from him and died in custody five days later. That book took the National Book Critics Circle Award.