Melville House Books

In an essay submitted to the New York Times before the death of her uncle, Joseph Dantica, while in the custody of US Immigration and the Department of Homeland Security (see yesterday’s MobyLives news digest), Edwidge Danticat talks about her family’s hopes for life in America. “As my Uncle Joseph liked to say,” she writes, “for people like us, the malere, the poor, the future was not a given. It was something to be clawed from the edge of despair with sweat and blood.”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.