Wednesday, March 15, 2023

Edwidge Danticat, an award-winning Haitian American author, will give this year’s Buckner Lecture.

“A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat” is slated for March 28 at 6 p.m. in the Warwick Center on the UNCW campus. Danticat will converse with associate professor of African American literature Maia Butler about her work, which addresses pressing global issues around nationalism and immigration, impacts of climate instability on global Southern communities, and local to international considerations of activism and literary production.

Danticat has written 15 novels, including Breath, Eyes, Memory, which was selected for Oprah’s Book Club. Her work Everything Inside won the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award and the Story Prize, making her the first two-time award winner.

Previous works include The Art of Death, Writing the Final Story, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; Claire of the Sea Light; Brother, I’m Dying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a National Book Award finalist; Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist; The Farming of Bones, an American Book Award winner; and The Dew Breaker, a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and winner of the inaugural Story Prize.

Danticat is a 2009 MacArthur Fellow, a 2018 Ford Foundation “Art of Change” Fellow, the 2018 Neustadt International Prize winner, the 2019 St. Louis Literary Award recipient, a 2020 United States Artists Fellow and the winner of the 2020 Vilcek Prize for Literature.  

Established by Charles F Green III in 1971, the Buckner Lecture series brings our generation’s most distinguished writers, speakers and artists to campus. The Buckner Lecture series is named in honor of Green’s friend, Katherine K. Buckner.

A Q&A and book signing will follow the presentation. The event is free and open to the public. Registration is required.

The series is co-sponsored by UNCW’s Department of English, Department of World Languages and Cultures, Interdisciplinary Minority Student Research Group, Upperman African American Cultural Center and Randall Library. For more information about Danticat, visit  https://www.prhspeakers.com/speaker/edwidge-danticat.