René Depestre (Author), Kaiama L. Glover (Translator) author biography, plus links to books by René Depestre (Author), Kaiama L. Glover (Translator).

René Depestre (Author), Kaiama L. Glover (Translator)

René 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 Aimé Césaire, Jacques-Stephen Alexis, Pablo Neruda, Jorge Amado, and André 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 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 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.

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, coeditor of Marie Vieux Chauvet: Paradoxes of the Postcolonial Feminine, and translator of Frankétienne's Ready to Burst. 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 is forthcoming. She is founding editor of sx archipelagos: a small axe journal of digital practice.

This biography was last updated on 05/02/2017.

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