Photo: Nancy Crampton

We at WVFC have  long admired Edwidge Danticat — starting in 2007, long before she guided us all through the newest turmoil in her homeland of Haiti early last year. As writers, many of us remember our first gasp at  The Farming of Bones, more accomplished than any debut had a right to be.  We were therefore both unsurprised and deeply pleased to find this video, after she won the Langston Hughes Award, joining a lineage that includes Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. Despite the wobbly camera work and fragment-like state of this clip,  we were entranced by Danticat as she talks about how “Langston Hughes also loved Haiti..he loved the people without shoes” and describes herself as “an accident of literacy.” There are no happier accidents.