Issues

Martin Munro is a lecturer in French and francophone literatures at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. He works on Caribbean literature written in French, particularly Haitian literature. He has published articles in journals such as French Studies, Research in African Literatures, Critique, and Journal of Haitian Studies and is the author ofShaping and Reshaping the Caribbean: The Work of Aimé Césaire and René Depestre (2000). He has just completed a manuscript on the theme of exile in Haitian writing.

Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw is a lecturer of francophone Caribbean literature and nineteenth-century French poetry at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. Her research focuses on the Caribbean cultural landscape as presented in the works of Gisèle Pineau, Yanick Lahens, and Simone Schwarz-Bart. Her most recent essay, entitled “Cyclone Culture and the Paysage Pineaulien,” appeared in Kunapipi’s special issue on the Caribbean. Her short stories have appeared in Callaloo and Small Axe. She is presently working on a collection of her short fiction and a trilingual anthology of Caribbean women writers from the anglophone, francophone, and hispanophone regions. 

Maximilien Laroche is one of Haiti’s foremost intellectuals, working in the areas of Haitian, Quebec, and American studies. Born in 1937 at Cap Haïtien, he is the author of numerous important studies, including La Double Scène de la representation: Oraliture et littérature dans la Caraïbe (1991), La Découverte de l’Amérique par les Américains(1989), Le patriarche, le marron et la dossa (1988), Contribution à l’ étude du réalisme merveilleux (1987), andL’Avènement de la littérature haïtienne (1987). His Haitian work has focused on questions of literature, language, oral culture, exile, and the collective imagination. In 1999 he was awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre National Honneur et Mérite de la République d’Haïti.

J. Michael Dash is professor of French at New York University and director of the Africana Studies Program. He is the author of Literature and Ideology in Haiti (1981), Haiti and the United States (1988), Édouard Glissant (1995), The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context (1998), and Culture and Customs of Haiti (2001); editor (with Charles Arthur) of Libete: A Haiti Anthology (1999); and translator of Gisèle Pineau’s The Drifting of Spirits(1999). He is currently at work on a manuscript entitled “Surrealism in the Francophone Caribbean.”

Marie-Agnès Sourieau teaches literatures in French at Fairfield University and directs the program in Latin American and Caribbean studies. She is the author of articles and book chapters on francophone literature, especially from the French Caribbean, including, recently, the afterword to the English translation of Gisèle Pineau’s Exile According to Julia (2003). She is the coeditor (with Kathleen Balutansky) of Caribbean Creolization: Reflections on the Cultural Dynamics of Language, Literature and Identity (1998) and Ecrire en pays assiégé: Haïti, Writing Under Siege (2004).

Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw is a lecturer of francophone Caribbean literature and nineteenth-century French poetry at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. Her research focuses on the Caribbean cultural landscape as presented in the works of Gisèle Pineau, Yanick Lahens, and Simone Schwarz-Bart. Her most recent essay, entitled “Cyclone Culture and the Paysage Pineaulien,” appeared in Kunapipi’s special issue on the Caribbean. Her short stories have appeared in Callaloo and Small Axe. She is presently working on a collection of her short fiction and a trilingual anthology of Caribbean women writers from the anglophone, francophone, and hispanophone regions. 

Vladimir Cybil was born in 1967 in Queens, New York. After receiving her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in the spring of 1993, she spent the summer at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In 1997 she had a year-long residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem. In 2003 she represented Haiti at the Bienal del Caribe in the Dominican Republic; and in 2004, at the Cuenca biennial, in Ecuador.

Jana Evans Braziel is assistant professor of English at the University of Cincinnati. She has published articles inCallaloo, Meridians, Journal of Haitian Studies, Tessera, and Journal of North African Studies. She is also the coeditor (with Kathleen LeBesco) of Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression (2001) and (with Anita Mannue) ofTheorizing Diaspora: A Reader (2003). She is currently completing a book entitled “Rethinking the Black Département,” which focuses on Haiti and its diasporic extraterritorial “tenth départment.”

Nicole Roberts is a lecturer of Hispanic literature and Spanish at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. She teaches courses on feminism, race, identity, and cultures of the Hispanic Caribbean (Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic). She has published work in the area of Afro-Hispanic literature and is currently working on a book that focuses on comparative analyses of thematic areas of unity in contemporary Afro-Hispanic Caribbean poetry.

Barbara Prézeau-Stephenson is a visual artist, art historian, and freelance curator. Born in Port-au-Prince in 1965, she has lived and worked in Canada, France, and Senegal. She now lives and works in Port-au-Prince, where, with other artists, she created the AfricAméricA Foundation and Cultural Center. She is a member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA), Southern Caribbean, and has contributed articles and images to magazines. 

Carl Hermann Middelanis teaches French, Spanish, and history at Westfalen-Kolleg, Bielefeld. His doctoral thesis analyzed the images and representation of Haiti in the texts and caricatures of the French media in the nineteenth century. Middelanis has curated several exhibitions, including the works of French caricaturist Honoré Daumier and of Haitian artists, and the photographs of Mexican author Juan Rulfo.

Patricia Mohammed is senior lecturer at the Centre for Gender and Development Studies and deputy dean at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. Her recent publications include Gender Negotiations among Indians in Trinidad, 1917–1947 (2001) and (as editor) Gendered Realities: Essays in Caribbean Feminist Thought (2002). She has published extensively in journals, books, magazines, and newspapers. Her main areas of interest are gender studies, history, and cultural studies. She is completing a manuscript entitled “Imaging the Caribbean” as well as a documentary film entitled “A Different Imagination.”

Gérarde Magloire-Danton is a PhD candidate in French studies at New York University, focusing on the postcolonial cultural issues and intellectual history that tie Haiti to France. Her broader research areas include discourses and politics of anthropology, colonial knowledge of African peoples and cultures, and black intellectual production. She has taught at Rutgers University, the Université de François Rabelais in France, and at New York University.

Maxence Denis is a Haitian director and video artist whose work plays on the contrasts between the moving images of video and abstract still images. Through his visual poetry, Denis aims to provoke audience involvement and to engender self-interrogation. He has exhibited in Montreal at the multicultural forum of AfricAméricA, at the Haitian Art Museum, and at the Hôtel de Ville in Paris. Denis has made several documentaries and experimental videos on Haitian history, including L’arbre de la liberté. In 2004 his film E pluribus unum received the prize for Best Art Film at the Black Film Festival held in Berlin.

Martin Munro is a lecturer in French and francophone literatures at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. He works on Caribbean literature written in French, particularly Haitian literature. He has published articles in journals such as French Studies, Research in African Literatures, Critique, and Journal of Haitian Studies and is the author ofShaping and Reshaping the Caribbean: The Work of Aimé Césaire and René Depestre (2000). He has just completed a manuscript on the theme of exile in Haitian writing.

Dany Laferrière was born in Port-au-Prince, where he worked as a journalist under the Duvalier regime. In 1976 he left Haiti for Montreal, where his first novel, Comment faire l’amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer (1985), won notoriety and acclaim. He is the author of numerous other works, including Eroshima (1987), L’odeur du café (1991),Le goût des jeunes filles (1992), Cette grenade dans la main du jeune nègre est—elle une arme ou un fruit? (1993),Pays sans chapeau (1999), and Le Cri des oiseaux fous (2000). Laferrière directed his first film, Comment conquérir l’Amérique en une nuit, in 2004.

Louis-Philippe Dalembert is a poet, short story writer, and novelist. Born in Port-au-Prince in 1962, he studied journalism at the École supérieure de journalisme in Paris and wrote his doctoral thesis in comparative literature on the work of Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier. His novels include Le Crayon du bon Dieu n’a pas de gomme (1996),L’Autre face de la mer (1998), and L’ île du bout des rêves (2003). Ces îles de plein sel et autres poèmes (2000) is Dalembert’s most recent collection of poetry. He divides his time between Rome and Paris.

Edwidge Danticat was born in Haiti and moved to the United States when she was twelve years old. She is the author of several books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), Krik? Krak! (1995), The Farming of Bones (1999), and The Dew Breaker (2004). She is also the editor of The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States (2001). A graduate of Barnard College, she received an MFA in creative writing from Brown University in 1993.

Évelyne Trouillot is a Haitian writer who has published poetry, short fiction, and novels. She has also written works for children, including L’oiseau mirage (1997) and L’ île de Ti Jean (2004). Her first collection of short stories, La chambre interdite, was published in 1996, followed by Islande and La mer, entre lait et sang in 1998. Trouillot’s first novel,Rosalie l’ infâme, was published in 2003. She divides her time in Haiti as an educator and a writer.

J. Michael Dash is professor of French at New York University and director of the Africana Studies Program. He is the author of Literature and Ideology in Haiti (1981), Haiti and the United States (1988), Édouard Glissant (1995), The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context (1998), and Culture and Customs of Haiti (2001); editor (with Charles Arthur) of Libete: A Haiti Anthology (1999); and translator of Gisèle Pineau’s The Drifting of Spirits(1999). He is currently at work on a manuscript entitled “Surrealism in the Francophone Caribbean.”

Dany Laferrière was born in Port-au-Prince, where he worked as a journalist under the Duvalier regime. In 1976 he left Haiti for Montreal, where his first novel, Comment faire l’amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer (1985), won notoriety and acclaim. He is the author of numerous other works, including Eroshima (1987), L’odeur du café (1991),Le goût des jeunes filles (1992), Cette grenade dans la main du jeune nègre est—elle une arme ou un fruit? (1993),Pays sans chapeau (1999), and Le Cri des oiseaux fous (2000). Laferrière directed his first film, Comment conquérir l’Amérique en une nuit, in 2004.