Drifting

?Drifting is a remarkable debut by a phenomenal writer. Much like Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, this sublime and powerful book allows us to experience the joys and tragedies of ordinary and extraordinary lives, in small neighborhoods and big cities, in the present and the past. Katia D. Ulysse’s talent soars higher and higher to expand both our hearts and our universe.”
--Edwidge Danticat, author of Claire of the Sea Light

?We already know that the Haitian-American community can produce some of our very finest fiction writers. With Drifting, Katia D. Ulysse proves that point once again, evoking the immigrant experience with delicacy, gravity, and pathos. Refreshing and arresting on the first read, this book will be remembered for a long time to come.”
--Madison Smartt Bell, author of The Color of Night

?In Drifting, Katia Ulysse delves into the complex lives of girls and young women. With boldness and clarity she shows us what she finds: the fears, cruelties, and humiliations of their childhood; disturbing feelings of longing, jealousy, and grief; an intense struggle to make sense of the unfathomable world of adults; and above all a determination to survive. In clear prose, Katia Ulysse tells the tangled truth of life and brings a sensitive eye to bear on complicated, flawed characters in circumstances at once everyday and extraordinary. These stories of displacement, struggle, renewal, and redemption are tough, piercing, and true, and they bear the mark of a gifted writer.”
--Michele Voltaire Marcelin

Drifting takes the reader from Haiti to the United States and back. The work is set before, during, and after the catastrophic earthquake of 2010. Drifting is filled with the irony that comes with seeking to escape tragedy, tumbling into even more, and discovering that a reversal of fortune is sometimes a change for the worse.

Ulysse's characters are everyday people: a ruthless entrepreneur who ferries peasants out of the countryside, promising them a better life in Port-au-Prince; the office worker who learns that the amount of money and time off she receives depend on her boss's definition of family; a mother of three who is desperate to leave Haiti to join the husband who left her behind; young girls who fall prey to a trusted schoolteacher who advises them to "work smart, not hard." And readers meet the desperate elderly woman who seeks the help of a vodun priest to help "fix" her dying husband.

Katia D. Ulysse was born in Haiti, and moved to the United States as a teen. She received a master’s degree from Notre Dame of Maryland University, and taught English in Baltimore City for ten years. Her writings have been published in numerous literary journals, including The Caribbean Writer, Meridians, Calabash, Macomere, Peregrine, Smartish Pace, among others. Her work also appeared in The Butterfly’s Way, Mozayik?a breakthrough anthology in Kreyol, Brassage, and Haiti Noir. Her first children’s book, Fabiola Can Count, was published in 2013. Katia lives in Maryland with her husband and daughter. When she's not teaching, reading, writing fiction, or gardening, she blogs on VoicesfromHaiti.com.