Monday

First, an admin announcement: Sunshine will be reading in Greensboro, NC this coming Saturday (September twenty-ninth) in celebration of the first anniversary of Cave Wall, a literary journal that published a couple of Sunshine's poems in its inaugural issue. The link above will take you to the official website, where the official announcement indicates the reading will be held at the UNCG faculty center at seven pm, but also neglects to give an address or directions to where that center is located. I don't know either. I suggest those needing directions follow the "contact us" link at the bottom of the official Cave Wall sidebar, or just call me Saturday. I'll mention all this again at the end of the week. Speaking of readings, Sunshine and I met just north of the Van Ness Station this evening for a spectacular reading by Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat¹ at the Politics and Prose Bookstore.² Ms. Danticat is an excellent resource for the kind of human interest creative writing that straddles the line delineating fiction form non. Her work often centers around her experiences of Haiti, where she lived until she was twelve years old and where she visits infrequently still. She grew up in a tough spot: her neighborhood of Bel Air, along with more notorious Cité Soleil, sees the brunt of Haiti's chilling gang-related drug violence as well as the equally devastating coalition-led antidrug violence. Her new book details the story of her father and uncle, brothers who took separate roads to the US thirty-five years apart. The selection she read was a harrowing story of people trapped between the two very frightening aggressors I mentioned above. Ms. Danticat is a charming and gracious speaker who manages to relate heartbreaking things with an empowered candor. I was very impressed. [Cavin]