About this item
Infused with magical realism, this story blends first love and political intrigue with a quest for justice and self-determination in 1930s Haiti.. Sixteen-year-old Lucille hopes to one day open a school alongside her best friend where girls just like them can learn what it means to be Haitian: to learn from the mountains and the forests around them, to carve, to sew, to draw, and to sing the songs of the Mapou, the sacred trees that dot the island nation. But when her friend vanishes without a trace, a dream - a gift from the Mapou - tells Lucille to go to her village's section chief, the local face of law, order, and corruption, which puts her life and her family's at risk. Forced to flee her home, Lucille takes a servant post with a wealthy Haitian woman from society's elite in Port-au-Prince.
About the Author
Nadine Pinede is the daughter of Haitian immigrants. She was born in Paris, where her parents were scholarship students, and she grew up in Canada and the US. Nadine graduated magna cum laude with highest honors from Harvard University and was awarded Harvard University's Captain Jonathan Fay Prize for outstanding imaginative work for her creative nonfiction thesis. She was the first Rhodes Scholar of Haitian descent and earned a Masters in English and French literature from St. John's College at Oxford University. Nadine received her PhD from Indiana University and an MFA in Fiction from the Whidbey Writers Workshop/Northwest Institute of Literary Arts.
She is the author of a poetry chapbook, An Invisible Geography. Her fiction has appeared in Haiti Noir, edited by Edwidge Danticat, and her nonfiction was published in Becoming: What Makes a Woman, edited by Jill McCabe Johnson. She was a contributor to American Decades: Primary Sources (1930s and 1940s) and translated a chapter on the Haitian Revolution from French for the Encyclopedia of African American Culture and History: The Black Experience in the Americas. Nadine's chapter on Walter Dean Myers was published in Literary Newsmakers. Her journalism has appeared in The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Radcliffe Quarterly, International Herald Tribune, and other publications. Visit her website at www.nadinepinede.com.
