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.

We live now in a global culture where anything that happens in a place that's 90 minutes from your shores really affects you.

That experience of touching down in a totally foreign place is like having a blank canvas: You begin with nothing, but stroke by stroke you build a life. This process requires everything great art requires-risk-tasking, hope, a great deal of imagination, all the qualities that are the building blocks of art. You must be able to dream something nearly impossible and toil to bring it into existence.

I think it is important to reach people through arts and literature, because then you establish a connection that's not an instant crisis.

I would hate for people to generalize about every Haitian from something that one Haitian did, or a group of Haitians did.

We need literature because we wouldn’t fully know ourselves without it. We need good literature to be fully human.

Napoleon had been fighting this army of slaves and free people in Haiti and it depleted his forces. And after the Revolution, when the French were driven out, they stopped and sold this big chunk of North America to the Americans for very little money.