Jean-Claude Duvalier, nicknamed "Baby Doc", was a Haitian politician who was the President of Haiti from 1971 until he was overthrown by a popular uprising in February 1986. He succeeded his father François "Papa Doc" Duvalier as the ruler of Haiti after his death in 1971. After assuming power, he introduced cosmetic changes to his father's regime and delegated much authority to his advisors. Thousands of Haitians were killed or tortured, and hundreds of thousands fled the country during his presidency. He maintained a notoriously lavish lifestyle while poverty among his people remained the most widespread of any country in the Western Hemisphere.
The Tonton Macoute or simply the Macoute was a Haitian paramilitary and secret police force created in 1959 by dictator François "Papa Doc" Duvalier. Haitians named this force after the Haitian mythological bogeyman, Tonton Macoute, who kidnaps and punishes unruly children by snaring them in a gunny sack before carrying them off to be consumed for breakfast. The Macoute were known for their brutality, state terrorism, and assassinations. In 1970, the militia was renamed the Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale. Though formally disbanded in 1986, its members continued to terrorize the country.
Edwidge Danticat is a Haitian-American novelist and short story writer. Her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, was published in 1994 and went on to become an Oprah's Book Club selection. Danticat has since written or edited several books and has been the recipient of many awards and honors. As of the fall of 2023, she will be the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor of the Humanities in the department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University.
Amy Gerstler is an American poet. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Marc Louis Bazin was a World Bank official, former United Nations functionary and Haitian Minister of Finance and Economy under the dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier. He was prime minister of Haiti appointed on June 4, 1992, by the military government that had seized power on September 30, 1991.
Mary Ruefle is an American poet, essayist, and professor. She has published many collections of poetry, the most recent of which, Dunce, was longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry and a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize. Ruefle's debut collection of prose, The Most Of It, appeared in 2008 and her collected lectures, Madness, Rack, and Honey, in 2012, both published by Wave Books. She has also published a book of erasures, A Little White Shadow (2006).
Héctor Tobar is a Los Angeles author, novelist, and journalist, whose work examines the evolving and interdependent relationship between Latin America, Latino immigrants, and the United States. In 2023, he was named a Guggenheim Fellow in Fiction.
Honor Moore is an American writer of poetry, creative nonfiction and plays. She currently teaches at The New School in the MFA program for creative nonfiction, where she is a part-time associate teaching professor.
Victoria Chang is an American poet, writer, editor, and critic.
Monica Youngna Youn is an American poet and lawyer.
Eula Biss is an American non-fiction writer who is the author of four books.
Carmen Giménez is an American poet, writer, and editor.
Lorraine Adams is an American journalist and novelist. As a journalist, she is known as a contributor to the New York Times Book Review, and a former contributor to The Washington Post. As a novelist, she is known for the award-winning Harbor and its follow-up, The Room and the Chair.
Brenda Wineapple is an American nonfiction writer, literary critic, and essayist who has written several books on nineteenth-century American writers.
Amanda Vaill is an American writer and editor, noted for her non-fiction. She lives in New York City.
Maggie Steber is an American documentary photographer. Her work has documented a wide range of issues, including the African slave trade, Native American issues in the United States, natural disasters, and science.
Paul Hendrickson is an American author, journalist, and professor. He is a senior lecturer and member of the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a former member of the writing staff at the Washington Post.
Lacy M. Johnson is an American writer, professor and activist. She is the author of Trespasses: A Memoir, The Other Side: A Memoir and The Reckonings: Essays.
Rebecca Donner is a Canadian-born writer. She is the author of All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, which won the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, and The Chautauqua Prize She was a 2023 Visiting Scholar at Oxford, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in recognition of her contribution to historical scholarship. She is currently a 2023-2024 Fellow at Harvard.
