MacArthur Genius Award winner Edwidge Danticat to speak at FIU Honors College event

WHAT: Florida International University’s Honors College and Tau Sigma Alpha (TSA), the Honors College Honors Society, will present “A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat,” at which the author will discuss her work, which focuses primarily on Haiti and Haitian culture.

WHO: Danticat is an award-winning author who has won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the American Book Award and the Pushcart Short Story Award. This week she received the prestigious MacArthur Foundation “Genius Award,” which comes with a prize of $500,000.

She is also the author of eight books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory;  Krik? Krak!;  The Dew Breaker;  The Farming of Bones; and her most recent, Brother, I’m Dying. She holds a B.A. from Barnard College and an M.F.A. from Brown University and has served as a visiting professor of creative writing at New York University (from 1996 to 1997) and the University of Miami (from 2000 to 2008).

WHEN AND WHERE: 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 30 at the Mary Ann Wolfe Theater on FIU’s Biscayne Bay Campus, 3000 NE 151^st St., North Miami.

FOR MORE INFORMATION: Contact Honors College Associate Dean & Fellow Juan Carlos Espinosa at 305-348-6795 or espinosj@fiu.edu.

Media Contact: Lissette Lanza at 305-348-2232. 

-FIU-

About FIU:
Florida International University was founded in 1965 and is Miami’s only public research university. With a student body of more than 38,000, its 17 colleges and schools offer more than 200 bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral programs in fields such as engineering, international relations and law. More than 100,000 FIU alumni live and work in South Florida. FIU has been classified by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching as a “High Research Activity University”. In August 2009, FIU welcomed the inaugural class of the Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine. For more information about FIU, visit http://www.fiu.edu.