The Butterfly's Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States

Patricia Benoit is a filmmaker living in New York City.

Jean-Pierre Benoit is Professor of Economics and Law at New York University.

Martine Bury is a freelance writer. Her work has appeared in several publications including Vibe, Jane, Nylon, and The Source.

Jean-Robert Cadet holds a master's degree in French literature and teaches French and American history in Cincinnati, Ohio. Restavec: From Haitian Slave Child to Middle-Class American is his first book.

Anthony Calypso is an actor who writes both fiction and nonfiction. He is a graduate of the MFA program in fiction at Sarah Lawrence College. He is at work on his first novel.

Sophia Cantave is a doctoral candidate in American literature and a lecturer at Tufts University. She is the author of an essay 'Who Gets to Create Lasting Images? The Problem of Black Representation in Uncle Tom's Cabin,' in Approaches to Teaching Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. She is also author of 'Geography, Language, and Hyphens: Felix Morrisseau-Leroy and a Changing Haitian Aesthetic,' published in The Journal of Haitian Studies.

Leslie Casimir is a journalist, currently working in New York City at the Daily News.

Myriam J. A. Chancy is the author of Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile (Temple University Press, 1997) and Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women (Rutgers University Press, 1997). Currently residing in Phoenix, Arizona, she is associate professor of English at Arizona State University, Tempe. She is at work on a novel entitled The Serpent's C/awand on a literary memoir focusing on Haiti and the Latin Caribbean.

Leslie Chassagne, born in Haiti and raised in New York City since the age of nine, studied art and language in the New York City University system and is currently a teacher at the Young Adult Learning Academy and Hunter College's International Language Institute. He is a poet, painter, and musician and has traveled throughout the Caribbean and Colombia.

Marc Christophe was born in Saint Marc, Haiti. He is professor of French and Caribbean literature at Howard University. This excerpt was adapted from his poem 'PRESENT PASSE FUTUR' which was published in his 1988 collection of poetry Le Pain de L'Exile (The Bread of Exile).

Joel Dreyfuss is a former senior editor at Fortune and a regular contributor to The Haitian Times.

Phebus Etienne is a poet living in Montclair, New Jersey.

Annie Gregoire is a teacher and an aspiring children's book writer. She teaches second grade at Cush Campus Schools, a private school in Brooklyn, New York. Gregoire received a master's degree in foreign language education at New York University, where she has also done extensive research in cross-cultural studies and children's literature.

Maude Heurtelou is a native of Haiti, where she completed high school. She holds an undergraduate degree from the San Carlos University/ INCAP in Guatemala and a master's degree in public health education. She has written over sixteen nonfiction books in Haitian Kreyol and two novels, Lafami Bonplezi and Sezisman, which have been translated into English. She and her husband, Fequiere Vilsaint, are the founders and publishers of Educavision, a publishing company.

Joanne Hyppolite was born in Haiti. Her family settled in the United States when she was four years old and she grew up in Boston. She has published two popular children's books, Seth and Samona (De-lacorte Press, 1995), which won the Marguerite DeAngell Prize for New Children's Fiction and Ola Shakes It Up (Delacorte, 1998). Her fiction addresses the Haitian-American experience.

Dany Laferriere was born in Haiti, where he practiced journalism under Duvalier. He went into exile in Canada in 1978; soon after, he began working on his first novel How to Make Love to a Negro, which became an instant bestseller in both the original French and in English and was made into a feature film. He now divides his time between Montreal and Miami.

Marie-Helene Laforest currently makes her home in Italy, where she teaches postcolonial literatures at the Instituto Universitario Orientale, Naples.

Francie Latour is a journalist, currently working at The Boston Globe.

Danielle Legros Georges is a writer living in Boston. Her work has been anthologized in The Beacon Best of 1999.

Miriam Neptune, age twenty-three, was born in the United States and raised in Los Angeles. She has taken an active interest in Haiti/ U.S. relations since the start of the 1991 coup, and hopes to produce documentary work on this subject. She is now a graduate student in New York University's Media and Culture program.

Nikol Payen received her B.A. in journalism from SUNY New Paltz and her MFA in creative nonfiction from Sarah Lawrence College. She was an assistant editor at Essence Magazine, where her writing has been featured. Other publications where her work has appeared include The Daily News Caribbeat, The Crab Orchard Review, Third World Viewpoint, New World, and a host of newsletters. Currently she is a professor of public speaking at Kingsborough Community College and is working on her forthcoming book, Something in the Water.

Marilene Phipps is a painter and poet. Author of Crossroads and Unholy Water, a collection of poetry published by Southern Illinois University Press, she is the winner of The Crab Orchard Review Poetry Prize and the Grolier Poetry Prize. She has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Harvard's Bunting Institute, and the Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions. Her paintings have been exhibited in gallery and museum shows in Haiti, the United States, and throughout the world.

Garry Pierre-Pierre is the publisher and founder of The Haitian Times. He has worked as a reporter for The New York Times and The Sun Sentinel.

Marie Nadine Pierre is currently living in Miami, Florida. She is a doctoral candidate in the Comparative Sociology Department at Florida International University. Her dissertation will examine issues of body, foods, and dress for Haitian women in the Miami area.

Assotto Saint, (ne Yves Lubin) was born in Haiti in 1957. He moved to New York in 1970 and was a performer with the Martha Graham Dance Company for many years. His nom de guerre, Assotto Saint, is derived from the combination of the name of a Vodou drum and that of Haitian Independence leader Toussaint Louverture, one of his heroes. An AIDS activist, he died in 1994, when he was thirty-seven years old.

Barbara Sanon is a Haitian-American filmmaker living in New York City.

Patrick Sylvain was born in Port-au-Prince Haiti and immigrated to the United States in 1981. He works as a bilingual education teacher in Massachusetts. His work has appeared in several literary magazines, including Callaloo, The Caribbean Writer, Compost, Agni, and Ploughshares as well as in the anthology The Beacon Best of 1999. He is the author of several books of poetry in Haitian Kreyol, including Mazakwa, Zanzet, and Twoket Lavi.

Marie Ketsia Theodore-Pharel, born in Haiti, currently lives in Jupiter, Florida, with her infant daughter and husband and teaches at West Palm Beach Community College. I'll Fly Away, her first picture book, was published in 1999 by Educavision Publishing Company. Her short stories have been published in magazines. 'The Mango Tree' appeared in Compost magazine in 1994; 'Soup Joumou: Diary of a Mad Woman,' in 1996; and 'Light Chocolate Child,' in African Homefront in 1995.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot is the author of Peasants and Capital: Dominion in the World Economy and Haiti, State Against Nation: The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism. 'Looking for Columbus' is the epilogue from his book Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, published by Beacon Press in 1996.