Seth and Samona is Joanne Hyppolite's first book, published when she was twenty-six years old. Hyppolite was born in Les Cayes, Haiti, in 1969, but her life in that country was brief: like Seth in the novel, her family moved to the United States when she was young, just four years old. She grew up in Dorchester, a predominantly Haitian area of Boston, which is where the novel takes place. After earning a bachelor's degree in creative writing from the University of Pennsylvania, she went on to study at the University of California at Los Angeles, where she earned her master's degree from the Department of Afro-American Studies. Seth and Samona, which was published in 1995, was awarded the Second Annual Marguerite de Angeli Prize from Delacorte Press, which published the book. Hyppolite's second novel, Ola Shakes It Up, is about a nine-year-old girl who moves from the...