Haitian-born writer Edwidge Danticat is the author of Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah Book Club selection; Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist; and The Farming of Bones, an American Book Award winner. Brother, I’m Dying, Danticat’s most personal book to date, centers around the men closest to her heart-her father and his brother, Joseph-and the tragedy that befell them, making headlines around the world.

Edward P. Jones was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Known World, a novel about black American slave owners. His first collection of short stories, Lost in the City, won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was shortlisted for the National Book Award. All Aunt Hagar’s Children is a collection of complex stories set in the author’s native Washington, D.C.

Zakes Mda is one of the most prominent novelists in South Africa today. A celebrated playwright, Mda has published the critically acclaimed novels The Whale Caller and The Heart of Redness. Cion follows a professional mourner named Toloki as he settles down with a family in Middle America on the eve of the 2004 Presidential Election. Toloki soon befriends the son, falls in love with the daughter, and learns from their mother a tradition of quilting that links her family to the escaped slaves who first settled in the area.