I'm happy to be part of this chorus of people who are trying to tell more complex stories about Haiti.

The Attorney General made another astonishing claim, that there were Pakistani terrorists possibly coming on these boats from Haiti. No one has ever seen a Pakistani coming on a boat from Haiti yet.

Someone has said that nations have interests, they don't have friends, and you see that over and over in U.S. policy.

That has always been a strength of Haiti: Beyond crisis, it has beautiful art; it has beautiful music. But people have not heard about those as much as they heard about the coups and so forth. I always hope that the people who read me will want to learn more about Haiti.

And the fact that Haiti was occupied for 19 years by the United States, from 1915 to 1934.

My models were oral, were storytellers. Like my grandmothers and my aunts. It's true, a lot of people in my life were not literate in a formal sense, but they were storytellers. So I had this experience of just watching somebody spin a tale off the top of her head. I loved that.

When you are working on something, you have to believe that people will still be reading when you're done!