It Can HAPPEN HERE In Haiti, EDWIDGE DANTICAT saw America as a BEACON of FREEDOM. But in recent LEGISLATION in her home state of Florida, she hears ECHOES of the OPPRESSIVE REGIMES her FAMILY FLED.

Earlier this year, my 2010 essay collection, Create Dangerously, was adapted for the stage and performed in Miami, where I live. Like the book, the play honors artists, particularly writers who have risked their lives to write their books—as well as the readers who have risked their lives to read them.

- EDWIDGE DANTICAT

It’s a legacy I know well, having grown up first in Haiti, then in the United States among Haitian expatriates. My friend Régine Chassagne, a singer from the indie rock group Arcade Fire, and I recently talked about how during the brutal Duvalier dictatorship in 1963 Haiti, her grandfather, the Haitian poet Roland Chassagne, was arrested at a Port-au-Prince publishing house for sharing “contraband literature.” He was taken to François “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s notorious prison dungeon, Fort Dimanche, and was never heard from again.