Hadriana in All My Dreams

Rene Depestre (b.1926) is one of the most important voices of twentieth century world literature. His vast corpus includes works of poetry, prose fiction, literary criticism, and political essays. A peer of and collaborator with such seminal political and literary figures as Aime Cesaire, Jacques-Stephen Alexis, Pablo Neruda, Jorge Amado, and Andre Breton, Depestre has engaged with the politics and aesthetics of Negritude, social realism, and Surrealism, among other major twentieth century phenomena, over the course of a career that has spanned more than half a century. Having lived and written through significant moments in Haitian, New World, and Pan African history––from the overthrow of Haitian dictator Elie Lescot in 1946, to the first Pan African Congress in Paris 1956, to a struggle with Haiti’s Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier in 1957, to collaboration with Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara and a fraught relationship with Fidel Castro in the 1960s and 70s––Rene Depestre is uniquely placed to reflect on the extent to which the entirety of the Americas and Europe are implicated in Haiti’s past and present reality.

Edwidge Danticat was born in Haiti and moved to the United States when she was twelve. She is the editor of Haiti Noir, and author of several books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah Book Club selection, Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist, The Farming of Bones, an American Book Award winner, and the novel-in-stories The Dew Breaker. She has also written several young adult novels and a travel narrative, After the Dance, A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel. Her memoir, Brother, I’m Dying, a memoir, 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 recipient of the John D. and Catherine MacArthur Foundation grant and she lives in Miami.

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Kaiama L. Glover?is associate professor of French and Africana Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is author of?Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon?(Liverpool UP), coeditor of?Marie Vieux Chauvet: Paradoxes of the Postcolonial Feminine?(Yale French Studies 2016), and translator of Franketienne’s?Ready to Burst?(Archipelago Books). She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the Fulbright Foundation. Her translation of Marie Chauvet’s?Dance on the Volcano?(Archipelago Books) is forthcoming. She is founding editor of?sx archipelagos: a small axe journal of digital practice.