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  • Contributors

Mario Benjamin was born in Port-au-Prince in 1964. A self-taught artist, he is one of the most important artists to have emerged in Haiti since the 1980s. Since his first exhibition in 1983, he has become one of the leading figures of the Haitian avant-garde, experimenting with multimedia, installation, video, and other mediums. Benjamin has exhibited in some of the most prestigious international biennials, including those of Havana, Johannesburg, São Paulo, Venice, and Santo Domingo.

Jana Evans Braziel is assistant professor of English at the University of Cincinnati. She has published articles in Callaloo, Meridians, Journal of Haitian Studies, Tessera, and Journal of North African Studies. She is also the coeditor (with Kathleen LeBesco) of Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression (2001) and (with Anita Mannue) of Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader (2003). She is currently completing a book entitled “Rethinking the Black Département,” which focuses on Haiti and its diasporic extraterritorial “tenth départment.”

Vladimir Cybil was born in 1967 in Queens, New York. After receiving her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in the spring of 1993, she spent the summer at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In 1997 she had a year-long residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem. In 2003 she represented Haiti at the Bienal del Caribe in the Dominican Republic; and in 2004, at the Cuenca biennial, in Ecuador.

Louis-Philippe Dalembert is a poet, short story writer, and novelist. Born in Port-au-Prince in 1962, he studied journalism at the École supérieure de journalisme in Paris and wrote his doctoral thesis in comparative literature on the work of Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier. His novels include Le Crayon du bon Dieu n’a pas de gomme (1996), L’Autre face de la mer (1998), and L’ île du bout des rêves (2003). Ces îles de plein sel et autres poèmes (2000) is Dalembert’s most recent collection of poetry. He divides his time between Rome and Paris.

Edwidge Danticat was born in Haiti and moved to the United States when she was twelve years old. She is the author of several books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), Krik? Krak! (1995), The Farming of Bones (1999), and The Dew Breaker (2004). She is also the editor of The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States (2001). A graduate of Barnard College, she received an MFA in creative writing from Brown University in 1993. [End Page 205]

J. Michael Dash is professor of French at New York University and director of the Africana Studies Program. He is the author of Literature and Ideology in Haiti (1981), Haiti and the United States (1988), Édouard Glissant (1995), The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context (1998), and Culture and Customs of Haiti (2001); editor (with Charles Arthur) of Libete: A Haiti Anthology (1999); and translator of Gisèle Pineau’s The Drifting of Spirits (1999). He is currently at work on a manuscript entitled “Surrealism in the Francophone Caribbean.”

Maxence Denis is a Haitian director and video artist whose work plays on the contrasts between the moving images of video and abstract still images. Through his visual poetry, Denis aims to provoke audience involvement and to engender self-interrogation. He has exhibited in Montreal at the multicultural forum of AfricAméricA, at the Haitian Art Museum, and at the Hôtel de Ville in Paris. Denis has made several documentaries and experimental videos on Haitian history, including L’arbre de la liberté. In 2004 his film E pluribus unum received the prize for Best Art Film at the Black Film Festival held in Berlin.

Dany Laferrière was born in Port-au-Prince, where he worked as a journalist under the Duvalier regime. In 1976 he left Haiti for Montreal, where his first novel, Comment faire l’amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer (1985), won notoriety and acclaim. He is the author of numerous other works, including Eroshima (1987), L’odeur du café (1991), Le goût des jeunes filles (1992), Cette grenade dans la main du jeune nègre est—elle une arme...

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