I’m the daughter of Haitian immigrants who were forced to leave their homeland because of a dictatorship. My mother was no doubt sharing her enthralling tales of Haitian history and family lore when I was in her womb. In our family tree, besides our ancestors from Benin whose stories are lost to us, we have an acclaimed botanist who wrote the first comprehensive book of Haiti’s medicinal plants, an innovative pianist and composer of Kompa Funk, a renowned graphic artist whose stamps are prized by collectors and married the American painter Lois Mailou Jones, a caco resistance fighter against the US occupation of 1915 to 1934, a military leader in the American Revolution, and my late father, an inventor of the push-button telephone and conference call technology. My geneological research was compiled into a gift book I gave my mother for her 80th birthday. My upcoming debut novel from Candlewick, When the Mapou Sings, is dedicated to her, my first storyteller, who encouraged me to write my own.
Second only to my mother, our public library was my treasure trove for stories. Perhaps winning our city’s Readathon, my school’s History Prize and a national poetry award should have been signs. Instead, I worked in higher education and nonprofits as a speechwriter and communications director. My shortest gig ever was one week as a server in a French castle, where I spent more time in the vast library than mixing Kir Royals.
Much happier stints were funding human rights and environmental activists, like the first Haitian winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize, Chavannes Jean-Baptiste. I also enjoyed serving as artist facilitator for a nonprofit that helped artists with disabilities.
My own invisible disabilities are fibromyalgia and endometriosis.. Lady Gaga and Frida Kahlo have made fibromyalgia more visible. For decades, I also had undiagnosed endometriosis. Author Hilary Mantel and millions of other women have and continue to suffer from it. Important similarities between fibromyalgia and endometriosis include how extreme their impact can be on the quality of life of patients and their families, how they both mostly affect women, and how research on both is severely underfunded.
I started out publishing essays and journalism until Haiti’s earthquake in 2010. In the aftermath of this devastating catastrophe, both natural and human-made, I turned to poetry. I wrote An Invisible Geography, poems of place and exile. My poetry has been anthologized and featured on NPR. I’m honored that it’s been used in poetry workshops in hospice and other places beyond the classroom. Now I’m also an anthologist. The Earth is a Living Thing: Black Poets & the Natural World was inspired by Christian Cooper and features the youngest Presidential Inaugural Poet Amanda Gorman, Nikki Giovanni, Ross Gay, Langston Hughes, and many others. It will be a beautifully illustrated book published in 2026 by Chronicle with art by Leila Fanner.
I live with my husband Erick Janssen near Brussels, within sight of a primeval forest adapting to climate change, its remarkable history unfolding in silence.
Bio
Nadine Pinede, PhD, is a poet, author, editor, translator, and education consultant. The daughter of Haitian immigrants, Nadine is the first Rhodes scholar of Haitian descent and earned her doctorate in Philosophy of Education. Author of award-winning informational books, her fiction appears in Haiti Noir, edited by Edwidge Danticat, and her Pushcart Prize-nominated poetry has been widely anthologized. Nadine’s debut young adult novel in verse When the Mapou Sings will be published by Candlewick Press in December.
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