Biography
Edwidge Danticat is the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor of the Humanities in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University.
She is the author of 18 books for both adults and children, including “Breath, Eyes, Memory” (an Oprah Book Club selection), “Krik? Krak!” (a National Book Award finalist), “The Farming of Bones” (an American Book Award winner), and the novels-in-stories “The Dew Breaker” and “Claire of the Sea LightHer” memoir, “Brother, I'm Dying,” was a 2007 National Book Award finalist and won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. She has edited several anthologies, including “The Butterfly's Way,” “Haiti Noir,” “Haiti Noir 2,” and “Best American Essays 2011.” She is a 2009 MacArthur Fellow, a 2018 Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellow, a 2018 Neustadt Prize winner, a 2019 Saint Louis Literary Award winner, a 2020 United States Artist Fellow, a 2020 Vilcek Prize winner, a 2023 PEN/Malamud Award winner. Her story collection Everything Inside won the 2020 Bocas Fiction Prize, The Story Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Prize and her 2024 essay collection, We’re Alone, was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for Nonfiction. She is the 2026 winner of the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature and received the 2026 New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture Medal of Excellence in April 2026. Her most recent novel Dèy, was published in August 2026.
