Anna Seghers, is the pseudonym of German writer Anna Reiling, who was notable for exploring and depicting the moral experience of the Second World War. Born into a Jewish family and married to a Hungarian Communist, Seghers escaped Nazi-controlled territory through wartime France. She was granted a visa and gained ship's passage to Mexico, where she lived in Mexico City (1941–47).
Frankétienne is a Haitian writer, poet, playwright, painter, musician, activist and intellectual. He is recognized as one of Haiti's leading writers and playwrights of both French and Haitian Creole, and is "known as the father of Haitian letters". As a painter, he is known for his colorful abstract works, often emphasizing the colors blue and red. He was a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2009, made a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et Lettres, and was named UNESCO Artist for Peace in 2010.
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.
Afro-Caribbean people or African Caribbean are Caribbean people who trace their full or partial ancestry to Africa. The majority of the modern Afro-Caribbean people descend from the Africans taken as slaves to colonial Caribbean via the trans-Atlantic slave trade between the 15th and 19th centuries to work primarily on various sugar plantations and in domestic households. Other names for the ethnic group include Black Caribbean, Afro or Black West Indian or Afro or Black Antillean. The term Afro-Caribbean was not coined by Caribbean people themselves but was first used by European Americans in the late 1960s.
Jérémie is a commune and capital city of the Grand'Anse department in Haiti. It had a population of about 31,000 at the 2003 census. It is relatively isolated from the rest of the country. The Grande-Anse River flows near the city.
Félix Morisseau-Leroy was a Haitian writer who used Haitian Creole to write poetry and plays, the first significant writer to do so. By 1961 he succeeded in having Creole recognized as an official language of Haiti, after expanding its teaching in schools and use in creative literature. Morisseau also published works on French, Haitian Creole and Haitian French literature. He worked internationally, encouraging the development of national literature in post-colonial Ghana and Senegal. In 1981 he settled in Miami, Florida, where he was influential in uniting the Haitian community around Creole and encouraged its study in academia.
Nathalie Handal is a French-American poet, writer and professor, described as a “contemporary Orpheus.” A New Yorker and a quintessential global citizen, she has published 10 prize-winning books, including Life in a Country Album. She is praised for her “diverse, and innovative body of work.”
Marie Vieux-Chauvet, was a Haitian novelist, poet and playwright. Born and educated in Port-au-Prince, she is most famous for the novels Fille d'Haïti (1954), La Danse sur le volcan (1957), Fonds des nègres (1960), and Amour, colère et folie (1968). During her lifetime, she published under the name Marie Chauvet.
Ida Faubert was a Haitian writer. She was a complex literary figure. Bicultural, biracial, and privileged, she neither easily fit socially-prescribed categories for women of color in France or Haiti nor conformed to them. A deft writer and socialite in both Port-au-Prince and Paris, she promoted and participated in the movements of Haitian writers and literature in Haiti and France.
Marie-Célie Agnant is an author who has been living in Quebec, Canada, since 1970. In 2023, she was appointed the tenth Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate.
Events from the year 1803 in France.
Haitian literature has been closely intertwined with the political life of Haiti. Haitian intellectuals turned successively or simultaneously to African traditions, France, Latin America, the UK, and the United States. At the same time, Haitian history has always been a rich source of inspiration for literature, with its heroes, its upheavals, its cruelties and its rites.
Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell is a Haitian-American poet, painter, and short story writer.
Haitians in France consist of migrants from Haiti and their descendants living in France.
Palestinian Haitians are Haitians of Palestinian descent, or Palestinians with Haitian citizenship.
Jacqueline Beaugé-Rosier was a Haitian-born educator and writer living in Ontario, Canada.
Maggy de Coster is a Haitian-born writer living in France. Until 1987, she wrote under her birth name Margareth Lizaire and is also known as Margareth Lizaire de Coster.
Suzanne Césaire, born in Martinique, an overseas department of France, was a French writer, teacher, scholar, anti-colonial and feminist activist, and Surrealist. Her husband until 1963 was the poet and politician Aimé Césaire.
Danielle Legros Georges is a Haitian-born American poet, essayist and academic. She is a professor of creative writing in the Lesley University MFA Program in Creative Writing. Her areas of focus include contemporary American poetry, African-American poetry, Caribbean literature and studies, literary translation, and the arts in education. She is the creative editor of sx salon, a digital forum for innovative critical and creative explorations of Caribbean literature.
