Klagsbrun Symposium features Edwidge Danticat

When Professor of English and Poet-in-Residence Kate Rushin asked award-winning Haitian American author Edwidge Danticat why she writes, Danticat replied, “It never felt like I had a choice.” 

Danticat was the featured author at the 20th Daniel Klagsbrun Symposium on Creative Arts and Moral Vision at Connecticut College. On the afternoon of April 18—just prior to the emergence of a vivid double rainbow that would frame the campus—Rushin engaged Danticat in a wide-ranging conversation before a standing-room-only audience in the College’s Blaustein Humanities Center. After the talk, the visiting author took questions and treated the gathered students, faculty, staff and local community members to a reading and book-signing. Earlier in the day, Danticat met with Rushin’s creative writing students and Visiting Assistant Professor and Writer-in-Residence Courtney Sender and her students.

Danticat was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Her family eventually left the Caribbean country’s Duvalier dictatorship and settled in New York City. Her parents wanted her to be a doctor, Danticat recalled, so they enrolled her in the Clara Barton High School for Health Sciences in Brooklyn. When she decided to pursue her MFA in creative writing instead, she told them she was going to be a teacher.

“For my parents, being a writer meant that you were setting yourself up to be killed,” Danticat said. “All the writers they’d ever heard about had been murdered or exiled.” She lightened the mood by mentioning the time Oprah lauded her first novel, sending it to the top of the bestseller list in 1998. She joked, “When Breath, Eyes, Memory was on Oprah’s Book Club, I remember my dad was like, ‘Oh, finally, you’ll have enough money for medical school.’”

Rushin, who met Danticat while they were both earning MFAs at Brown University, asked Danticat to elaborate on her writing, which often centers on dark parts of Haitian history and her own family history. “When you write about these difficult topics, you’re also talking about love and family and community. How do you navigate these different subjects, and the personal losses that you’ve gone through, to be able to produce your work?” Rushin asked.

Danticat said, “I see my work as a way of processing my loss. In my memoir, Brother, I’m Dying, in the same year, my Uncle Rick, who raised me, died in immigration custody, my father had pulmonary fibrosis and my daughter was born—there was this circularity of life. I realized the book was coming together so fast because writing the book was like visiting with my uncle and father who had passed. I was with them in those pages. The writing itself is part of the grieving process.”

Danticat has won numerous awards, including the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and several National Book Critics Circle Awards. She was recently appointed the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor of the Humanities in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University.

Her 20 published works include Breath, Eyes, Memory; National Book Award finalist Krik? Krak!; American Book Award winner The Farming of Bones; and The Art of Death, a National Book Critics Circle finalist for Criticism. Brother, I’m Dying was a 2007 finalist for the National Book Award and a 2008 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. Her book of essays, We’re Alone, is coming out later this year, and her novel, The Once and Future Dead, will be published in 2025.

Rushin and Associate Professor of English Jeff Strabone organized the recent event, which was a collaboration between the Department of English and the Office of Advancement. Rushin credited the impressive turnout and lively Q&A session to the work her fellow English professors did to prepare their students for Danticat’s visit.

Strabone said, “It was a joyous occasion to see two great American authors, Edwidge Danticat and our own Kate Rushin, talk about writing and literature at a high, yet accessible level. And, at the same time, we honored the legacy of the Klagsbrun family, who have been great friends of the English Department and the College for decades.”

The Daniel Klagsbrun Symposium was established in 1989 to create a positive, living memorial to Daniel Klagsbrun, a 1986 graduate of Connecticut College. Through the generosity and commitment of Daniel’s parents, Emilie and Herbert Klagsbrun, the symposium has brought to the College an amazing array of authors, including: Dorothy Allison, Saul Bellow, Joseph Brodsky, Sandra Cisneros, Michael Cunningham, E.L. Doctorow, Jhumpa Lahiri, Wally Lamb, Colum McCann, Jay McInerney, Adrienne Rich, David Sedaris, Jessica Soffer ’07, Art Spiegelman, Amy Tan, Hannah Tinti ’94, Elie Wiesel and Tobias Wolff.