While still in Haiti, Danticat began writing at nine years of age. At the age of 12, she moved to Brooklyn, New York, to join her parents in a heavily Haitian-American neighborhood. As an immigrant teenager, Edwidge's disorientation in her new surroundings was a source of discomfort for her, and she turned to literature for solace. Danticat did not realize the racism until she went to college because of the protection of her community. Two years later she published her first writing in English, "A Haitian-American Christmas: Cremace and Creole Theatre," in "New Youth Connections", a citywide magazine written by teenagers published by Youth Communication. She later wrote another story about her immigration experience for "New Youth Connections", "A New World Full of Strangers". In the introduction to "Starting With I", an anthology of stories from the magazine, Danticat wrote: "When I was done with the piece, I felt that my story was unfinished, so I wrote a short story, which later became a book, my first novel: "Breath, Eyes, Memory"...Writing for "New Youth Connections" had given me a voice. My silence was destroyed completely, indefinitely."