Blue Flare: Three Contemporary Haitian Poets: Évelyne Trouillot, Marie-Celie Agnant, Maggy de Coster

Three celebrated poets illuminate the complexity of life in Haiti and its diaspora in the 21^st century, particularly for women, in this exceptional and unprecedented trilingual collection. In Évelyne Trouillot’s sensual poems about love and yearning, she asks repeatedly ＂in what language should I speak to you＂? Marie-Célie Agnant addresses poverty, pain, death, but also the pleasures of passion. Maggy De Coster’s concise and personal poems explore the world -- its nature, light, wind -- and, sometimes, political themes. Together, these poems navigate between an impulse to ＂capture gently these moments of light＂ (De Coster) and the very different insistence that we see how ＂pain sits at ground level / at times charging like a beast＂ (Agnant). The original poems in French and Haitian Kreyòl appear facing the English translations by Danielle LeGros Georges. Agnant is the 2023 Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate.

Évelyne Trouillot lives in Port-au-Prince, where she is a professor of French at the Université d’Etat d’Haiti. She is the author of five novels, four collections of short stories, two volumes of stories for children, two books of poems, and an award-winning play. She is a member of one of Haiti’s most fertile intellectual and literary families, standing alongside her siblings: novelist Lyonel Trouillot; anthropologist, historian, and political scientist Michel-Rolph Trouillot; and Kreyòl scholar and children’s book author Jocelyne Trouillot. She, her daughter, and her brother Lyonel, founded Pré-Texte, a writer’s organization that sponsors reading and writing workshops.

Marie-Célie Agnant is a writer, translator, and activist whose novels have been widely-translated and include The Book of Emma (2004) which evokes the hardships endured by enslaved women in the Caribbean and the challenges to giving voice to this history today. Living in Montréal and writing across literary genres, she has produced poetry, fiction, tales, and books for young readers. She received the Prix Alain-Grandbois of the Academie des Lettres du Quebec in 2017 for her most recent collection of poetry, Femmes des terres brûlées (2016). Her critically-acclaimed work offers poignant refusals of silence. She worked with Bread and Puppet Theatre and regularly visits Vermont. Agnant is the 2023 Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate (national poet laureate).

Maggy de Coster is a poet, essayist and anthologist who lives in Paris. She has worked as a journalist in Haiti, France, Switzerland, England and Barbados, and is the author of more than 20 books in a variety of literary and other genres. De Coster received the Jean-Cocteau Poetry Prize in 2004. She founded and directs the literary journal Manoir des Poètes, and her poems have been translated into Spanish, Catalan, Italian, and Arabic.

Translator Danielle Legros Georges is the author of Island Heart (2021), translations of the poems of Haitian-French writer Ida Faubert, among other titles. Her poems have been widely published, anthologized, and included in international artistic commissions and collaborations. In 2014, Legros Georges was named Poet Laureate of the City of Boston. She is the creative editor of sx salon, a digital forum for explorations of Caribbean literature, and a professor of creative writing at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA.