...women, brave as stars at dawn

Especially moments when things are very difficult and complicated for me and I am still trying to grasp what is happening and I am still trying to understand and to reach family back home.

Even when I think of writing fiction, it's being kind of a liar, a storyteller, a weaver, and there's that sense of how much of this is your life. The story is a way you unravel your life from behind a mask.

It's hard to tell what people will do with the word and how they'll be circulating it but I think the storytellers and the stories themselves will always be there.

Once you're involved in the work, it's really just you and the characters and the words.

America's relationship with Haiti has always been very complicated. I often say to people, "Before we came to America, America came to us in the form of the American occupation from 1915 to 1934."

I remember reading an interview with a writer who said that in nonfiction if you have one lie it sort of messes it up. But in fiction the real details give you so much more credibility, because people do so much research just to write fiction. In fiction you're trying to recreate something lifelike.