News

If you’d like to help with the Haitian earthquake relief effort, please consider these organizations. A big thank you to Edwidge Danticat and Conor Bohan of the Haitian Education Leadership Program (HELP) for this vetted list.

• • Gaskov Clerge Foundation
  • Ayiti Demen/Fokal
  • Ayiti Community Trust
  • Haiti Health/St. Boniface Haiti Foundation
  • Hope for Haiti
  • Lambi Fund

• Also, please consider:

• Lidè Haiti. Their operations in Les Cayes, one of the hardest hit cities, are run by Rosaline Duclair, a HELP alumnus
• Haitian Timoun Foundation, a longstanding partner of HELP

In memory of my mother, Claudette Pinede, the Haitian Education and Leadership Program (HELP) has created the Claudette Pinede Memorial Scholarship Fund. This scholarship will support young Haitian women who want to pursue careers in Science, Technology, Engineering & Math (STEM). If you would like to help Haiti build a stronger future and help us support young Haitian women’s dreams of a university education, here is your chance! Please contribute and share this information with others. What makes HELP so special, is that they operate completely from Haiti, all their staff is there, they go to schools all over the country, including remote rural areas, to recruit promising young students, and they actively guide those who receive a scholarship for 5 years through university, and everything is included, tuition, housing, living expenses, books, even language and leadership courses. You can visit this page to learn more about HELP’s approach. So, please consider making a donation! All donations will be used, even if we would not achieve our own fund’s goals, towards the education of a young Haitian woman. If we do achieve our goals, we will make sure everyone who has contributed will get the opportunity to learn more about the student and receive regular updates about her scholarship.

I am absolutely delighted to be represented by Rubin Pfeffer, who works with some of my favorite authors and illustrators of children’s and young adult literature.

Danielle Georges, the award-winning former poet laureate of Boston, has curated a special selection of Haitian women poets for The Haitian Times. It’s titled In Praise of Mothers, Other-Mothers, and Mothers of the Mind. I’m thrilled to be included!

2020

Congratulations to all the writers, artists, editors, and publishers whose books were selected for the New York Times’ Best Children’s Books of 2020. Two books from Enchanted Lion made the list: The Strange Birds of Flannery O’Connor, by Amy Alznauer, illustrated by Ping Zhu, and When You Look Up, by Decur, also available in a Spanish-language edition.

Such an insightful New Yorker article about Telephone Tales, written by Gianni Rodari, illustrated by Valerio Vidali, and translated from Italian by Antony Shugaar. Enchanted Lion Books is the first to publish this groundbreaking collection as a full English-language edition.

A big thank you to Catia Chien, who invited me help curate picture books for A Thousand Worlds, a new directory that connects readers to beautiful books by BIPOC creators.

I’m excited to join the editors and agents at Pitch Fest 2020, organized by Philadelphia Stories, to help writers with their queries, pitches, and opening pages.

I participated in the SCBWI & Smithsonian Institution Nonfiction Conference. My book Women in Film, featuring behind-the-scene stories about Ava DuVernay and Hidden Figures, was made available in the Conference bookstore. Women in Film also offers Common Core activities and additional Web Resources.

What a great honor to interview poet Marilyn Nelson and artist Philomena Williamson, creators of Lubaya’s Quiet Roar.

My blog appeared on the Enchanted Lion Books website. ELB also recently ran a successful Kickstarter campaign.

My opinion piece was published in the The Brussels Times, Belgium’s largest daily news in English.

I received an IPOC Women’s Scholarship sponsored by Matt de la Peña, the Newbery Medal winner and New York Times bestseller. Many thanks to Matt and SCBWI for this opportunity to participate in the SCBWI Summer Spectacular, the world’s biggest children’s literature conference!

I’m excited to be among the 10 grantees attending the first-ever virtual WNDB Boot Camp, designed to help us challenge the lack of representation in the publishing industry. A big thank you to We Need Diverse Books and Serendipity Literary Agency for their support.

I’m honored that my poetry is part of Food for Thought, a free online poem-making workshop led by my amazing friend, the poet, author, and palliative care clinician, Judith Redwing Keyser. Redwing is the director of Patient and Caregiver Education at the MERI Center (Making Education Relevant and Integrated) for Primary Palliative Care Education at the Mt. Zion Campus of the University of California, San Francisco. The author of Last Acts of Kindness: Lessons for the Living from the Bedside of the Dying, Redwing has received awards from the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine and The Coalition for Compassionate Care of California.

My poem On Safety was also published by A Network for Grateful Living, a global nonprofit that regularly offers resources like this free e-course with poet David Whyte. Poetry is the ultimate soul food!

I’m so grateful to We Need Diverse Books for everything they do to create “a world where all children can see themselves in the pages of a book” and to its co-founder and my fabulous mentor Stacey H. Lee. Stacy is an award-winning author of historical and contemporary fiction for young adults. Watch her webinar on The Downstairs Girl, her most recent historical novel that I couldn’t put down once I started it.

2019

I attended the Whole Novel Workshop at the Highlights Foundation and I have been selected to participate in the Representation Matters Mentorship Program in publishing. Many thanks to those who support wonderful programs like these!

I joined the team at Enchanted Lion as Editor at Large. I’m working with Claudia Zoe Bedrick, the president, editor, and art director, to create an inaugural series of children’s books in translation from Africa and the African diaspora.

A Network for Grateful Living, a global organization offering online and community-based educational programs and practices which inspire and guide a commitment to grateful living, posted my poem Serenity.

Women in Film was nominated for a Crystal Kite Award from the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators.

I was accepted for membership to the European Association for Creative Writing Programmes. You can find my bio on their Individual Members page.

Women in Film, my second nonfiction book for young readers, has been selected for the Recommended Reading List of books published in 2018, compiled by the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI).

Older news

In October 2018, I talked about and led a discussion of Haiti Noir and Haitian literature for Waterstones Book Club at the Muntpunt Library’s Literair Salon in Brussels.

I was interviewed for a short film about Under the Volcano, produced by the Mexican ‘Instituto de Radio y Televisión Morelense.’

In May 2018, I attended the Southern France Writing Intensive in Fiction and Creative Nonfiction with Kate Moses and Jennifer Steil.

My novel excerpt was published in Under the Volcano: The Best Writing of Our first 15 Years. Contributors include Russell Banks, Sandra Cisneros, Grace Paley, and Magda Bogin.

My poem “Becoming Belgium” was published on the website On Being, hosted by Krista Tippett.

The artist Leslie Nichols created a portrait of me using text from Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their eyes were watching God.”

The Society for Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators invited me to their 2015 writer’s retreat in Belgium.

I discussed my poetry and invisible disability in interviews with Public Radio and ArtsWork Indiana.

The Furious Flower Poetry Center in Harrisonburg, Virginia invited me to give a poetry reading in 2014, with support from three departments at James Madison University—the College of Arts and Letters, the Department of English, and the School of Art, Design and Art History—and in concert with “A Book for the ’Burg”.

As part of this event, students of the “Performance for the Lens” class taught by Corinne Diop of JMU’s School of Art, Art History, and Design created a group exhibition—Beyond Mountains—of photographs inspired by my poems (see also here).