Renowned author and National Book Award nominee Edwidge Danticat reads from her new book in Little Haiti

MIAMI – Internationally renowned author and National Book Award nominee Edwidge Danticat reads from her new book, Brother, I’m Dying, at Fanm Ayisyen Nan Miyami/Haitian Women of Miami (FANM)’s After School Program, on Friday, November 9, at 6 pm in the upstairs auditorium at Jean-Jacques Dessalines Center, 8325 N.E. 2nd Avenue.

The event is free, and through the generosity of Libreri Mapou.

Proceeds from the evening’s sales of Ms. Danticat’s books will go to support FANM. Attendees will enjoy a marvelous reading by a world famous author, and support FANM’s important work at the same time.

The program will be hosted and presented by the children of FANM’s After School program, which is generously funded by the Children’s Trust and the City of Miami. Children’s Trust Board Member Josee Gregoire will also be in attendance to share information on how to access Children’s Trust programs.

In September 9’s New York Times Sunday Book Review, Jess Row wrote of Brother, I’m Dying:

Joseph Dantica, one of two brothers at the heart of this family memoir, was a remarkable man: a Baptist minister who founded his own church and school in Port-au-Prince, Haiti; a survivor of throat cancer who returned to the pulpit using a mechanical voice box; a loyal husband and family man who raised his niece Edwidge Danticat to the age of 12, when she joined her parents in Brooklyn. (The “t” at the end of “Danticat” is the result of a clerical error on her father’s birth certificate.) When Dantica fled Haiti in 2004, after a battle between UN peacekeepers and chimères — gang members — destroyed his church and put his life in jeopardy, he was 81, with high blood pressure and heart problems, and yet for 30 years had resisted his family’s pleas to emigrate to the States. He intended to return and rebuild his church as soon as the fighting stopped. But to the Department of Homeland Security officers who examined him in Miami, his plea for temporary asylum meant he was simply another unlucky Haitian determined to slip through their fingers. When he collapsed during his “credible fear” interview and began vomiting, the medic on duty announced, “He’s faking.” That refusal of treatment cost him his life: he died in a Florida hospital, probably in shackles, the following day.