September 5, 2024
The Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival and The Center for Fiction hosted a keynote conversation and the official launch of Edwidge Danticat’s new collection of essays, We’re Alone. Roxane Gay, the bestselling author of An Untamed State, Bad Feminist, Hunger, and more, joined Danticat to discuss this brilliant collection.
We’re Alone traces a loose arc from Danticat’s childhood to the COVID-19 pandemic and recent events in Haiti. From hurricanes and political violence to being a new student at a Brooklyn elementary school knowing little English and her account of a shooting hoax at a Miami mall, Danticat displays an extraordinary ability to move from the personal to the global and back again. Her essays traverse personal narrative, reportage, and tributes to mentors and heroes such as Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Gabriel García Márquez, and James Baldwin, and explore several abiding themes including environmental catastrophe, the traumas of colonialism, motherhood, and the complexities of resilience. Throughout, Danticat shows how literature and art have been steadfast companions and guides to her amid tragedies and triumphs.
Co-presented with the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival.
Featured Book
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We're Alone
By Edwidge Danticat
Published by Graywolf
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 in 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. And so “we’re alone” is both a fearsome admission and an intimate invitation—we’re alone now, we can talk. 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.
In Conversation
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Edwidge Danticat
Edwidge Danticat
Edwidge Danticat is the author of the essay collection We’re Alone and numerous other books, most recently the story collection Everything Inside, winner of the Bocas Fiction Prize, the Story Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Prize, and The Art of Death, a National Book Critics Circle finalist in Criticism. Her novels include Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah Book Club selection, Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist, and The Farming of Bones, an American Book Award winner. Her memoir, Brother, I’m Dying, was the winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award and a finalist for the National Book Award. Among other awards, she has received a MacArthur Fellowship, the Neustadt Prize, and the Vilcek Prize. She teaches at Columbia University.
Photo Credit: Lynn Savarese
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Roxane Gay
Roxane Gay
Roxane Gay’s writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times bestselling Bad Feminist, the nationally bestselling Difficult Women, and the New York Times bestselling Hunger. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. She has several books forthcoming and is also at work on television and film projects. She also has a newsletter, The Audacity and once had a podcast, The Roxane Gay Agenda.
Photo Credit: Reginald Cunningham
