Celebrating Haiti: Books by Haitian & Haitian American Authors

Novels

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  Breath, Eyes, Memory

  by Edwidge Danticat

  At the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from the impoverished village of Croix-des-Rosets to New York to be reunited with her mother, where she gains a legacy of shame that can only be healed when she returns to Haiti, to the woman who first reared her.

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  The Kingdom of No Tomorrow

  by Fabienne Josaphat

  In 1968 Oakland, a young Haitian woman, Nettie Boileau, joins the Black Panthers’ Free Health Clinics and falls in love with defense captain Melvin Mosley. Their efforts to launch the Illinois chapter draw the attention of J. Edgar Hoover, forcing Nettie to confront the challenges of gender equality within the fight for social justice.

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  Mouths Don't Speak

  by Katia D. Ulysse 

  Jacqueline Florestant, a Haitian immigrant in the U.S., tries to stay emotionally afloat after the 2010 Haitian earthquake rips her family apart. Horrified and guilt-ridden, Jacqueline returns to Haiti in search of the proverbial "closure." Unfortunately, the Haiti she left as a child 25 years earlier has disappeared. Her quest turns into a tornado of deception, desperation, and more death. So Jacqueline holds tightly to her daughter—the only one who must not die.

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  God Loves Haiti 

  by Dimitry Elias Léger

  Haiti's first lady Natasha Robert, living in Port-au-Prince, adjusts to life after the earthquake of 2010 hits the city, and wonders if she will ever again see her true love, Alain Destinâe, who was injured during the disaster.

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  My Mother's House 

  by Francesca Momplaisir

  Moving his family to an immigrant enclave in New York in the hopes of starting over, an emotionally damaged Haitian man succumbs to dark impulses that have dangerous ripple effects for the others living in his home. A literary thriller about the complex underbelly of the immigrant American dream—the triumphs and failure, mundane and aberrant—all told by an unexpected narrator: a house that has held unspeakable horrors.

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  Dancing in the Baron's Shadow

  by Fabienne Josaphat

  Haiti, 1965. The impoverished island nation's brutal dictator rules with an iron fist. As the regime threatens to crush them, two brothers—a struggling taxi driver and a wealthy professor—fight to survive.

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  Village Weavers

  by Myriam J.A. Chancy

  In 1940s Port-au-Prince, Gertie and Sisi, two girls with an unbreakable bond, are torn apart by a deathbed revelation, and over the decades, they are parted and reunited, slowly learning the truth of their singular relationship, until they are brought together one last time to reckon with and—perhaps—forgive the past.

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  Sweet Undoings

  by Yanick Lahens; translated by Kaiama L. Glover

  In Port-au-Prince, violence never consumes. It finds its counterpart in a "high-pitched sweetness," a sweetness that overwhelms Francis, a French journalist, one evening at the Korosol Resto-Bar, when the broken and deep voice of lounge singer Brune rises from the microphone. Brune's father, Judge Berthier, was assassinated, guilty of maintaining integrity in a city where everything is bought. Six months after this disappearance, Brune wholly refuses to come to terms with what has happened. Her uncle Pierre, a gay man who spent his youth abroad to avoid persecution, refuses to give up on solving this still-unpunished crime as well. 

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  Hadriana In All My Dreams

  by Rene Depestre; translated by Kaiama L. Glover

  During Carnival in 1938 in the Haitian village of Jacmel, a beautiful young French woman, Hadriana, is about to marry a Haitian boy from a prominent family. But on the morning of the wedding, Hadriana drinks a mysterious potion and collapses at the altar. Transformed into a zombie, her wedding becomes her funeral. She is buried by the town, revived by an evil sorcerer, and then disappears into popular legend.

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  The Garden of Broken Things

  by Francesca Momplaisir

  Taking her teenage son from New York to Port-au-Prince where she hopes for them to connect with family, single mother Genevieve finds their visit turning into a nightmare of survival when the country is rocked by a massive earthquake.

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  The Roving Tree

  by Elsie Augustave

  Set between the two worlds of contemporary suburban America and Haiti under Papa Doc's rule, Iris Odys, adopted by a white American couple at age five, struggles as an adult to recapture her Haitian heritage and personal history.

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  Memory at Bay

  by Évelyne Trouillot; translated by Paul Curtis Daw

  Memory at Bay is a novel structured in monologues that alternate between the bedridden widow of a notorious dictator (in effect, a portrait of Papa Doc Duvalier) and the young émigré who attends to her needs and whose mother was a victim of the dictator's atrocities. Neither one can read the other's thoughts, but their flashbacks and reminiscences provide radically contrasting accounts of the Duvalier regime. 

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  Savage Seasons

  by Kettly Mars

  Recounts a woman's efforts to free her husband, a journalist arrested by the brutal regime of the Haitian government in the 1960s.

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  Dance on the Volcano

  by Marie Chauvet; translated by Kaiama L. Glover

  The story of two sisters growing up during the Haitian Revolution in a culture that swings heavily between decadence and poverty, sensuality and depravity. One sister, because of her singing ability, is able to enter into the white colonial society otherwise generally off-limits to people of color.  It is a story about hatred and fear, love and loss, and the complex tensions between colonizer and colonized.

Young Adult Novels

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  American Street 

  by Ibi Zoboi

  Separated from her detained mother after moving from Haiti to America, Fabiola struggles to navigate the home of her loud cousins and a new school on Detroit's gritty west side, where a surprising romance and a dangerous proposition challenge her ideas about freedom.

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  Dear Haiti, Love Elaine

  by Maika and Maritza Moulite

  Told in epistolary style through letters, articles, emails and diary entries, follows the experiences of Alaine Beauparlant, a Haitian American teen, who is sent to work in a Haitian nonprofit, where she learns about local culture and her family heritage. Suddenly, the secrets Alaine’s mom has been keeping, including a family curse that has spanned generations, can no longer be avoided.

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  One of the Good Ones

  by Maika and Maritza Moulite

  When teen social activist and history buff Kezi Smith is killed under mysterious circumstances after attending a social justice rally, her devastated sister Happi and their family are left reeling in the aftermath. As Kezi becomes another immortalized victim in the fight against police brutality, Happi begins to question the idealized way her sister is remembered.

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  When the Mapou Sings

  by Nadine Pinede

  Sixteen-year-old Lucille hopes to open a school alongside her best friend where girls can learn what it means to be Haitian, but when her friend vanishes, a dream sets events in motion where Lucille risks losing everything she cares about.

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  Simone Breaks All the Rules

  by Debbie Rigaud

  At 17 Simone Thibodeaux is fed up with her over-protective mother's insistence on micro-managing her life, like picking her prom date from a "nice" Haitian immigrant family, and anyway she is determined to attend with Gavin Stackhouse (even if he does not know that yet); so together with her fellow late-bloomer friends Simone comes up with a bucket list of rule-breaking—but soon things get complicated, and Simone has to decide which rules are worth breaking, and which should just be left alone.

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  A Girl's Guide to Love & Magic

  by Debbie Rigaud

  Fifteen-year-old Haitian American Cicely is excited to celebrate the West Indian Day Parade with her aunt, and voodoo dabbler, Mimose, but when Mimose's dabbling goes awry and she becomes possessed by a spirit, Cicely, Renee, and Kwame, her crush, must find a way to set things right.

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  (S)kin

  by Ibi Zoboi

  Fifteen-year-old Marisol, who sheds her skin every new moon and shifts into a fireball witch, is connected by a family secret to 17-year-old Genevieve, who reaches for some memory of her estranged mother, in a novel in verse based on Caribbean folklore.

Stories

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  Ayiti

  by Roxane GayA collection of stories explores Haitian diaspora experience, from a married couple seeking boat passage to America to a mother taking a foreign soldier into her home as a boarder.

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  You Were Watching from the Sand: Short Stories

  by Juliana Lamy

  A stylistically and conceptually daring collection that winds from fantastical horror to mischievous domestic realism and always keeps in its sharp, compassionate view the material, spiritual, and emotional lives of Haitian people.

Poetry

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  Haiti Glass

  by Lenelle Moise

  In her debut collection of verse and prose, Moise moves deftly between memories of growing up as a Haitian immigrant in the suburbs of Boston, to bearing witness to brutality and catastrophe, to intellectual, playful explorations of pop culture enigmas like Michael Jackson and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Be it the presence of a skinhead on the subway, a newspaper account of unthinkable atrocity, or the 'noose loosened to necklace' of desire, the cut of Haiti Glass lays bare a world of resistance and survival, mourning and lust, need and process, triumph and prayer.

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  When the Pipirite Sings: Selected Poems

  by Jean Métellus translated from the French by Haun Saussy

  When the Pipirite Sings expresses an acute historical consciousness and engages recurrent Haitian themes—the wrenching impact of colonialism and underdevelopment, the purposes of education, and the merging of spiritual and temporal power. And, as always with Métellus's poetry, the range of voices and points of view evokes other genres, including fiction and cinema.

Anthologies

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  Haiti Noir

  edited by Edwidge Danticat

  The island nation of Haiti has a very tragic history and continues to be one of the most destitute places on the planet. Here, however, Edwidge Danticat reveals that even while the subject matter remains dark, the caliber of writing coming out of Haiti is of the highest order. This volume includes new stories by: Edwidge Danticat, Gary Victor, Madison Smartt Bell, M.J. Fievre, Evelyne Trouillot, Marilene Phipps, Marie Ketsia Theodore-Pharel, Katia Ulysse, Yanick Lahens, Kettly Mars, Marvin Victor, and others.

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  Haiti Noir 2: The Classics

  edited by edited by Edwidge Danticat

  The original bestselling Haiti Noir comprised all-new stories by today's best Haitian authors. This new volume collects the true classics of Haitian literature—both short stories and excerpts from longer works—and will be an integral piece of understanding how Haitian culture has evolved over the past fifty years.