Reading Groups

In Short: Edwidge Danticat’s “Without Inspection” with Maia Butler

$35

1 Session

In stock

Tuesday, 6:00 pm EDT - 7:30 pm EDT August 25, 2026

Online via Zoom

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“It took Arnold six and a half seconds to fall five hundred feet.”

Everything Inside, Edwidge Danticat’s 2019 collection, is presented as a short-story cycle representing the lives of Haitian emigrants to the United States in the wake of the Duvalier dictatorship. The stories examine the lives, love, labor, and radical hope of the next generation of Haitians lòt bò dlo—on the other side of the water from their home nation.

“Without Inspection,” one story in the collection, introduces us to Arnold, an immigrant whose formative memories animate his fall during a tragic workplace accident in Miami. This timely piece breathes life into Arnold, his partner Darline, her son Paris, and their community in Little Haiti, even as contemporary anti-Haitian rhetoric rises, meant to dehumanize the nearly one million Haitian immigrants in the U.S.

The six and a half seconds we’ll spend with Arnold and his memories are intimate and tender, while the broader contexts of the U.S. imperial relationship to Haiti and its rapidly expanding immigration detention industrial complex loom as a background he can’t escape, even in his fall. Let us join Danticat in her lifelong project of faithful witnessing.

Reading List:

“Without Inspection” by Edwidge Danticat (A copy of the story will be emailed upon registration.)

What to expect from this reading group: I’ll bring questions to the reading circle to get us going, and participants should feel welcome to do the same. I hope participants will enjoy organic exchange, as our meaning-making becomes richer when all participants bring what they know into the circle. I look forward to sharing important concepts in literary studies that will shift the way you encounter, engage with, and understand the work.

What to read in advance: Please read “Without Inspection” in its entirety. A copy of the story will be emailed upon registration.

We offer a limited number of need-based scholarships for our Reading Groups and Writing Workshops, covering 50% of tuition. Applicants selected for scholarships will be notified one week prior to the first meeting. To apply for a scholarship, please fill out this form.

Pricing inclusive of sales tax if applicable. Please note: All virtual classes are recorded. Please click here for information about our recording policy.

Led by

Maia L. Butler

Maia L. Butler

Maia L. Butler (she/her/s) is Associate Professor of African American Literature at UNC Wilmington. She is a literary geographer centering Black women writers within African Diasporic and Anglophone Postcolonial studies. She co-founded the Edwidge Danticat Society, co-edited the award-winning collection Narrating History, Home, and Dyaspora: Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat (University Press of Mississippi, 2022) and the collection bell hooks’s Radical Pedagogy: New Visions of Feminism, Justice, Love, and Resistance in the Classroom (Bloomsbury, 2025), and is at work on her first monograph Floating Homelands: Postnational Constructions of Home by Black Women and Nonbinary Writers, which has been supported by a Mellon fellowship in Democracy and Landscape Studies, hosted by Dumbarton Oaks, a Harvard trustee.

About this series

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Whether you’re looking to catch up on great novels or you’re interested in exploring a new writer or literary period, our reading groups offer high-level literary discussion led by experts in the field.

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