Edwidge Danticat is the author of several books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah Book Club selection, Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist, The Farming of Bones, The Dew Breaker, Create Dangerously, Claire of the Sea Light, and Everything Inside. She is also the editor of The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States, Best American Essays 2011, Haiti Noir and Haiti Noir 2. She has written seven books for children and young adults, Anacaona, Behind the Mountains, Eight Days, The Last Mapou, Mama’s Nightingale, Untwine, My Mommy Medicine, as well as a travel narrative, After the Dance. Her memoir, Brother, I’m Dying, was a 2007 finalist for the National Book Award and a 2008 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. She is a 2009 MacArthur fellow, a 2018 Ford Foundation “The Art of Change” fellow, and the winner of the 2018 Neustadt International Prize.
Marlene L. Daut (Professor of American Studies & Carter Woodson Institute Associate Director ) specializes in pre-20th-century Caribbean, African American, and French colonial literary and historical studies. Her first book, Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-1865, was published in 2015 by Liverpool University Press’ Series in the Study of International Slavery. Her second book, Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism, was published in fall 2017 from Palgrave Macmillan’s series in the New Urban Atlantic. She is also working on a collaborative project entitled, An Anthology of Haitian Revolutionary Fictions (Age of Slavery), which is under contract with the University of Virginia Press. Daut is the co-creator and co-editor of H-Net Commons’ digital platform, H-Haiti. She also curates a website on early Haitian print culture at http://lagazetteroyale.com and has developed an online bibliography of fictions of the Haitian Revolution from 1787 to 1900 at the website http://haitianrevolutionaryfictions.com.
Régine Michelle Jean-Charles is a feminist literary scholar and currently Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and African and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College. Her scholarship and teaching on world literatures in French includes work on Black France, Sub-Saharan Africa, Haiti and the Haitian diaspora. She also teaches classes on race and gender like “Where #blacklivesmatter Meets #metoo” and “Black Feminisms 101.” She holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, and an AM and PhD from Harvard University. She has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Mays Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. Her first book, Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary (Columbia University Press: 2014) examines theoretical, visual, and literary texts in order to challenge the dominant views of sexual violence. She has authored numerous publications that have appeared in books, edited volumes, and peer-reviewed journals. Her current research focuses on black feminist ethics in contemporary Haitian literature.
Gina Athena Ulysse is a Haitian-American anthropologist, feminist, poet, performance artist and activist. Professor Ulysse earned her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Michigan. She is currently a full professor of anthropology at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. Ulysse is most known for her 2015 book Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle.[1][2][3]“Because When God Is Too Busy: Haiti, Me, & The World” is a one-woman show written and performed by Ulysse that combines history, theory, and personal narrative in spoken word with Vodou chants to reflect on childhood memories, social justice, spirituality, and the incessant dehumanization of Haitians.[3] Because When God is Too Busy: Haiti, me & THE WORLD was published in book form on April 7, 2017.