Haiti's eloquent daughter: in the bicentennial year of the conflict-ridden land of her birth, Edwidge Danticat lives in Miami's "Little Haiti" and continues to write about "those things that haunt me.".

When Breath, Eyes, Memory, Edwidge Danticat's first novel, debuted l0 years ago, reviewers predicted the then 24-year old writer would become an important literary voice. With five books and several literary prizes behind her, the author has proven the predictions right and has earned a loyal following of readers who have come to appreciate her now familiar voice.

Today, Danticat, a Haitian native who moved to the United States when she was 12, is widely considered a gifted "American" storyteller. She is also regarded as a literary spokesperson for some of the one million Haitians living hi exile--whether self-imposed or forced--outside the island nation. In between writing books, Danticat has taught creative writing as a visiting professor at New York University and the University of Miami.

The soft-spoken Danticat represents the people of her homeland, but she is more than willing to share the responsibility with others. "It's easy not to feel the weight of being responsible for speaking for all Haitians, because no one person can speak tot a whole community," she says. "The community is complex, it is not homogeneous. I know there are many other voices out there, by far I'm not the only one."

Danticat's pain-filled novels of battle scarred and emotionally wounded immigrants who come to America to build new lives and shed old identities only to find themselves inextricably tied to a homeland they both love and hate, also resonate with thousands of non-Haitian readers. Americans of various hues whose knowledge of Haiti was once limited to what they saw on the evening news, now consider her required reading.

This past spring, Breath, Eyes, Memory (Soho Press, reprint edition, May 1998) was the subject of a series of readings and discussion programs around Miami, where thousands of Haitian immigrants live. The book was part of Miami-Dade County's celebration of Haiti's bicentennial and the library system's One Book, One Community Reading Project, which encourages residents to read the same book over the same period.

Two years ago, Danticat left her beloved East Flatbush neighborhood in Brooklyn, and moved to the "Little Haiti" section of Miami, trading in one well-known Haitian immigrant enclave far another. She says leaving New York was difficult, but love beckoned. His name is Faidherbe Boyer. She met him in Haiti while she was leading a group of college students studying Haitian politics and culture. Boyer, a volunteer teacher at a local school, became the tour guide for Danticat's group. In Miami, he owns a translation services company.

Little Haiti is an impoverished area undergoing gentrification. It is known for its large number of Haitian refugees who came in Florida by boat and their vocal political activism regarding U.S. policy in Haiti. Danticat says she and her husband simply chose a place where they could feel at home. "I didn't want to live in a gated community," she says. "I wanted to live in a neighborhood that was like my neighborhood in Haiti, where I knew nay neighbors and didn't have to drive everywhere."

Danticat's newest hook, The Dew Breaker (Knopf) was released in March. Like much of her past work, the interconnected short stories weave back and forth between Haiti and the United States and revolve around a "dew breaker" a government sanctioned torturer, who moves to New York hoping to escape his past and live a peaceful, remorseful life in anonymity. The ghosts of his victims will not leave him alone, however. In Brooklyn, they haunt Iris conscience, forcing him to live a guarded, semisecluded life with his wife and daughter as his only friends.

Danticat said it was inspired by stories about sightings of "a particular person in Brooklyn," an alleged killer, the former leader of a Haitian paramilitary group that in the early 1990s terrorized and killed hundreds of supporters of recently ousted president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. This man was arrested and jailed by the U.S. government and then mysteriously released. To the consternation of many Haitians, he now lives freely among his compatriots in New York.

"I was intrigued by the idea that someone can migrate to another country and can still come face to face with somebody who once tortured them back home," Danticat says. "It's also intriguing that he isn't afraid to walk among the community. It speaks to the tolerance of the community."

The book's theme is a prescient one. In recent years, several American newspapers have written about many former Haitian torturers living in the United States, many of them in south Florida. Last year, several of them were deported to Haiti by fire U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

The Dew Breaker follows other notable works by Danticat. Krik? Krak! (Soho Press, April 1995), her first collection of short stories, was a finalist for a National Book Award. The Farming of Bones (Penguin, September 1999), a novel about the real life 1937 slaughter of Haitian sugarcane workers in neighboring Dominican Republic, won an American Book Award.

After the Dance: A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti (Crown, August 2002), about Carnival season in Haiti, is her sole authored work of nonfiction. It is part memoir, part Haitian history, part travelogue. She has edited two books, one called The Butterfly's Way: Voices From the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States (Soho Press, February 2001). Breath, Eyes, Memory was an Oprah Book Club favorite that introduced thousands of readers to Danticat's work.

Those who have trouble understanding Haiti's long tradition of blood soaked politics, violent military coups and, in more recent times, fleeing refugees, have only to pick up one of Danticat's books for clarity. They will also learn much about Haitian culture, its strong family traditions, its deep respect fur the elderly, its acclaimed artwork--things some Haitians complained do not show up nearly enough in her books.

Danticat is sensitive to the criticisms, but she says she writes about "those things that haunt me" During a book-signing in March at Marymount College in New York, a young Haitian woman angrily asked Danticat why she focused so much on violence and other negative subjects about Haiti.

Danticat says she tried to explain to the young woman that Haitian history is steeped in drama and violence, and that those writing honestly about the country just cannot escape. "There are just things about it that you can't make up" she says. "It has a complicated and nuanced history, it fascinates me, and writing about it helps me to try to make sense of it:"

She says Haitians sometimes view Haiti through two extreme prisms. There is the Haiti of their parents and grandparents: verdant, clean, peaceful and safe. "A paradise," she says. And there is the Haiti of political massacres and street chaos, crippling poverty and starvation.

"You have to find your own image somewhere in the middle," she says. "Haiti is a sad reality mixed in with enormous beauty. We can acknowledge that both exist.

"Right now, the Haitian experience is just what I'm interested in," she says. "There are eight million stories in Haiti, just as many stories as there are people.

"Basically all I've ever wanted to do in life is write. I never wanted a big house or a nice car, I wanted just to be able to write and everything I've tried to do was to negotiate ways to do that. If I get good responses to it, it's just one more sign to me that I should keep doing it. It tells me that I have chosen the right path."

Marjorie Valbrun has written about immigrants as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Miami Herald.