ITHACA, N.Y. -- Noted Haitian novelist Edwidge Danticat will be reading from her latest book, The Dew Breaker , Friday, April 16 , at 7 p.m. in Kaufmann Auditorium of Goldwin Smith Hall at Cornell University. Danticat's reading is part of a two-day conference on campus titled "The Haitian Revolution in Global Context: A Bicentennial Commemoration," April 16 and 17.

In addition to being a featured reader during the conference, Dandicat also is the final guest in the Black Authors/New Books Series sponsored by Cornell's Africana Studies and Research Center. The reading is free and open to the public, and a book signing and reception will follow.

"The Haitian Revolution in Global Context: A Bicentennial Commemoration" conference is being hosted by the Africana Studies and Research Center and the Society for the Humanities at Cornell. The conference will bring together a distinguished group of scholars to examine the slave uprisings in Saint Domingue and their centrality to the overthrow of New World slavery. The conference sessions will be structured around four broad themes: Revolutionary Emancipation in Haiti and New World Slavery; The Black Jacobins and the Modern World; Emancipation and the Creative Imagination; and Post-Emancipation and the Wages of Sovereignty. Most conference events will be held in the sixth-floor conference room of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art on campus, and they are free and open to the public. The conference is co-sponsored by Cornell's Departments of History, Anthropology, Comparative Literature and English, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art and Cornell Cinema.

For a full listing of sessions, speakers and film screenings related to the conference, visit the conference Web site at http://www.asrc.cornell.edu/haiti/haiti_conference.html .

Danticat was born in Haiti in 1969. She came to the United States when she was 12 years old and published her first writings in English two years later. She holds a degree in French literature from Barnard College, an MFA from Brown University, and she lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. Her short stories have appeared in 25 periodicals, and she won the 1995 Pushcart Short Story Prize, as well as fiction awards from The Caribbean Writer ,Seventeen and Essence magazines. Her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory , received wide critical acclaim, as did her first collection of short stories, Krik? Krak! which was a finalist for the National Book Award.The Farming of Bones , her third book, published by Soho in 1998, describes the 1937 massacre on the Haitian-Dominican border.

For more information about the Danticat reading and the conference, contact Salah Hassan, acting director of the Africana Studies and Research Center, or Fouad Makki, conference coordinator and visiting professor at the Africana Center, at (607) 254-8668, or by e-mail at fmm2@cornell.edu .