A New York Times Notable Book
A Miami Herald Best Book of the Year

A moving and deeply personal account of art and exile from Edwidge Danticat, winner of two National Book Critics Circle Awards—now with a new preface by the author

"Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. This is what I've always thought it meant to be a writer. Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them."—Create Dangerously

In this deeply personal book, the celebrated Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat reflects on art and exile, examining what it means to be an immigrant artist from a country in crisis. Inspired by Albert Camus' lecture, "Create Dangerously," and combining memoir and essay, Danticat tells the stories of artists, including herself, who create despite—or because of—the horrors that drove them from their homelands.

She writes about the Haitian novelists she first read as a girl at the Brooklyn Public Library, Jean-Michel Basquiat and other artists of Haitian descent, and a renowned Haitian radio journalist whose political assassination shocked the world. She also eulogizes an aunt who guarded her family’s homestead in the Haitian countryside, a cousin who died of AIDS while living in Miami as an undocumented immigrant, and a Haitian woman mutilated in a machete attack who became a public witness against torture.

Create Dangerously is an eloquent and moving expression of Danticat's belief that immigrant artists are obliged to bear witness when their countries of origin are suffering from violence, oppression, poverty, and tragedy.

"Powerful. [Danticat] acknowledges that the prospect of writing about tragedies and vanished cultures is a daunting one, yet she is not daunted: she accepts that by some accident she exists and has the power to create, and so she does." - TheNewYorker.com

"In Danticat's many remarkable stories and pensées from the gut, one locates the inimitable power of truth. Authorship becomes an act of subversion when one's words might be read and acted on by someone risking his or her life if only to read them." - Publishers Weekly

"Danticat's writing is crisp and clear. . . . Not just another writer's book about writing, this volume delves into the suffering that affects artists who suspend themselves from time and place to create." - Library Journal