Salon d’Ayiti: A Living Tribute to René Depestre

“The real conversation between spirit and flesh most likely takes place in some undefined realm, a place neither here nor there, where the soul pounds into the body—or flees the body—in a way that only some among the living can fully understand.”

—Edwidge Danticat on René Depestre

Haiti Cultural Exchange and The Center for Fiction collaborate to celebrate the work & living legacy of Haitian author René Depestre.

Haitian author René Depestre is one of the most important voices of twentieth-century world literature. Depestre was born in Jacmel, Haiti, on August 29, 1926. His vast corpus includes works of poetry, prose fiction, literary criticism, and political essays. A peer of and collaborator with such influential political and literary figures as Aimé Césaire, Jacques-Stephen Alexis, Pablo Neruda, Jorge Amado, and André Breton, Depestre has engaged with the politics and aesthetics of Negritude, Marxism, 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 François “Papa Doc” Duvalier in 1957, to collaboration with Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara and a fraught relationship with Fidel Castro in the 1960s and 70s––René Depestre has been uniquely placed to narrate how the entirety of the Americas and Europe are implicated in Haiti’s past and present reality.

Depestre’s distinct style is at its best in such timeless works as Hadriana dans tous mes rêves [Hadriana in All My Dreams], Le Mât de Cocagne [The Festival of the Greasy Pole], and Un arc-en-ciel pour l’Occident chrétien [A Rainbow for the Christian West], among other major publications, many of which have been awarded prestigious literary prizes, including the Prix Goncourt de la nouvelle, the Prix Renaudot, the Prix Guillaume Apollinaire, and the Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe et du Tout-Monde

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About the panel

KAIAMA L. GLOVER 

Kaiama L. Glover is a translator and scholar of Black Studies, French and Literary Studies. She is a professor at Yale University in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Glover’s research, writing, and teaching are situated at the intersection of French, francophone, Caribbean, and Haitian literary studies. Her work explores phenomena of border-crossing, marginality, gender, and canon-formation, querying––through rigorous textual study––the shifting categories of ‘center’ and ‘margins’ as they are constituted across the postcolonial Afro-Americas. Her work has been supported by fellowships at the New York Public Library Cullman Center, the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, the PEN/Heim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation. She has translated several works of fiction and non-fiction from French to English, notably Frankétienne’s Ready to Burst (2014), Marie Chauvet’s Dance on the Volcano (2016), René Depestre’s Hadriana in All My Dreams (2017), and Françoise Vergès’s The Wombs of Women: Capitalism, Racialization, Feminism (2019). Glover is an awardee of the PEN/Heim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation. In addition to her published works, Glover has contributed to the field of digital humanities through projects such as In the Same Boats, which visualizes networks of "Caribbean, Latin American, African, European, and Afro-American intellectuals" in the 20th century. She also serves as a founding co-editor of archipelagos | a journal of Caribbean digital praxis. 

EDWIDGE DANTICAT

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, Brother, I’m Dying, Create Dangerously, Claire of the Sea Light, The Art of Death, Everything Inside, a Reese’s Book Club selection and National Book Critics Circle Awards winner. 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, and 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  “Art of Change” fellow, the winner of the 2018 Neustadt International Prize, the 2019 St. Louis Literary Award, the 2011 Bocas Nonfiction Prize and 2020 Bocas Fiction Prize,  the 2020 Vilcek Prize for Literature, a 2020 United States Artists Fellow, a two-time winner of The Story Prize, and the 2023 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story.  Her essay collection, We’re Alone, will be published in September 2024. She teaches at Columbia University.

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