If A Woman Is Worth Remembering,' Said

I Hope To Be A Good Role Model For My Daughters.

It's Not A Matter Of Whether The Reviews Of Your Books Are Good Or Bad, It's About Being Taken Seriously, Both As A Woman Writer And As A Writer Of Color. Also, It Worries Me When People Point To A Couple Of Women Writers Or Writers Of Color Who Get Some Attention - And I Am Sometimes Pulled Into That Category - To Prove That Others Are Getting A Fair Shot. It's Like Those People Who Keep Saying That Racism No Longer Exists In This Country Because Barack Obama Was A President Of The United States.

These Were Our Bedtime Stories. Tales That Haunted Our Parents And Made Them Laugh At The Same Time. We Never Understood Them Until We Were Fully Grown And They Became Our Sole Inheritance.

There Is This Split Between The Haiti Of Before The Earthquake And The Haiti Of After The Earthquake. So When I'm Writing Anything Set In Haiti Now, Whether Fiction Or Nonfiction, Always In The Back Of My Mind Is How People, Including Some Of My Own Family Members, Have Been Affected Not Just By History And By The Present But Also By The Earthquake.

You Have All These People In The City And Everything Has Become Centralized. If You Live Outside The City And You Need A Birth Certificate Or Some Official Paper From The Government, You Have To Travel To The City.