In the 1980s, when people were just beginning to talk about AIDS, there were just a few categories of those who were at high risk: homosexuals, hemophiliacs, heroin addicts, and Haitians. We were the only ones identified by nationality.

I don't know what will happen to the physical book and what it will mean for authors. I worry whether it will mean people can still make their careers this way. Will whatever comes next allow people to be able to own their ideas and be able to take time to develop them?

I was neither doing these people nor myself a favor by showing up when my heart wasn't in it. There were not getting the real me, the whole me, the true me.

I come from a place where breath, eyes, and memory are one, a place from which you carry your past like a hair on your head. Where women return to their children as butterflies or as tears in the eyes of the statues that their daughters pray to

To start with, for example this year, 2004, is the bicentennial of Haitian independence.

The greatest gift anyone can give to a writer is time.

Love is like the rain. It comes in a drizzle sometimes. Then it starts pouring and if you're not careful it will drown you.