In
Elektrik, eight women writers from Haiti, Martinique, and Guadeloupe come together to explore, in poetry and prose, the complex nature of Caribbean existence. A single mother has an intimate encounter with a migrant worker; a teenager discovers her sexuality in the shadow of her twin sister; a poet summons a chorus of sirens, only to warn them: "Keep your voices' beauty from waylaying sailors." Through glittering translations from French,
Elektrik sings the experience of Franco-Caribbean identity today. These writers communicate through the silence of the past to the unknowability of the future--forever in the rare language of literature.
Mireille Jean-Gilles, born in French Guiana in 1962, is an agro-economist. Wife of the poet Monchoachi, she currently lives in Martinique and works on the financial problems of the French overseas collectivities. She clings to words and numbers with equal passion, always in search of a poem. Her most recent collection tracks the character of the woman in "Voracious street."
Born and raised in Martinique and now living in Paris, Gaël Octavia writes novels, poetry, theater, and short stories. She also paints and makes short films. Inspired by Martinican society, her texts explore themes of family, identity, and the female condition. Her plays have been read and performed in France, the United States, the Caribbean, Reunion Island, and Africa. Her first novel,
La fin de Mame Baby, received the Wepler Jury Special Mention Award in 2017.
Born in France to Caribbean parents, Fabienne Kanor is a writer and filmmaker whose novels include
D'eaux Douces,
Humus,
Je ne suis pas un homme qui, and
Louisiane. Her works interrogate race and gender in France and the French Antilles, and West African migrations to France. Awarded the Chevalier des Arts & des Lettres and the 2020 Casa de Las Americas Prize, Kanor is a professor of French and Francophone Studies at Penn State.
Marie-Célie Agnant was born in 1953 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and has lived in Canada since 1970. Her writings include four novels, two short story collections, and three volumes of poetry. She has also worked as a storyteller, an interpreter, a teacher, and an environmental activist. In her literary works, she offers lyrical explorations of the unsaid, legacies of violence, and loss in families and societies consumed by memories they share in silence. She received the Prix Alain-Grandbois of the Academie des Lettres du Quebec in 2017 for her most recent collection of poetry,
Femmes de terres brûlées(2016). In 2023, she was appointed Canada's 10th Parliamentary Poet Laureate.
Kettly Mars is an award-winning Francophone writer from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, who has been producing short stories, poems, and novels since the mid-1990s. Her work has been translated into Danish, Dutch, English, German, Italian, and Japanese. Her most recent novel,
The Patriarch's Angel, is a thriller about a cursed Haitian family and explores the conflict between vodou culture and Christian culture in modern-day Haiti.
