Biographical note

René Depestre, born in 1926, is one of the most important voices of Haitian literature. A peer of seminal figures Aimé Césaire, Pablo Neruda, and André Breton, Depestre has engaged with the politics/aesthetics of negritude, social realism, and surrealism for more than half a century. Having lived through significant moments in Haitian and New World history-from the overthrow of Haitian dictator Élie Lescot in 1946, to the first Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris in 1956, to a struggle with Haiti's François "Papa Doc" Duvalier in 1957, to a collaboration with Cuban revo- lutionary Che Guevara and a fraught relationship with Fidel Castro in the 1960s and '70s-Depestre is uniquely positioned to reflect on the extent to which the Americas and Europe are implicated in Haiti's past and present.