Danielle Legros Georges

Danielle Legros Georges is a Haitian-American poet, essayist and academic. She is currently Poet Laureate of the city of Boston, and is a professor at Lesley University in the Creative Arts in Learning Division. Her areas of focus are on contemporary American poetry, African-American poetry, Caribbean literature and studies, literary translation, and the arts in education.

Biography

Danielle Legros Georges was born in Gonaïves, Haiti, but her family left the island as political exiles and moved to Zaire, and then when Legros georges was six years old to Boston, Massachusetts, where she grew up among other Haitian migrants in the Mattapan district.

After graduating from Emerson College with a bachelor's degree in Communication Studies, she became part of the Dark Room Collective of Black writers, and went on to earn a master's degree in English and creative writing from New York University.

Her poetry has appeared in many literary journals – including Agni, The Boston Globe, Transition, World Literature Today, SpoKe, SX Salon, The Caribbean Writer, Callaloo, Ibbetson Street, Salamander, Poiesis, Black Renaissance Noire, Macomère, and The American Poetry Review – and she has been widely anthologised. Her debut book of poems, Maroon, was published in 2001 by Northwestern University Press. Her second collection, The Dear Remote Nearness of You (Barrow Street Press, 2016), won the New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize.

Since 2001 Legros Georges has taught in Lesley University's Creative Arts in Learning Division.

In 2014 she was chosen as Boston's poet laureate, the second person to hold the position since the first appointee, Sam Cornish, in 2008. In this ceremonial role she "is tasked with raising the status of poetry in the everyday consciousness of Bostonians, acting as an advocate for poetry, language and the arts, and creating a unique artistic legacy through public readings and civic events."

Believing in the importance of diversity, she quoted Langston Hughes' 1935 poem "Let America Be America Again" in an essay she wrote in 2013, saying: "America is best when it recognizes its inherent plurality. Americans are best when, embracing plurality, we move toward and seek to understand those around us. Americans are best when we are engaged and dialogic .... It allows us to see that, though different in many ways, de Crèvecoeur, Wheatley, and Lazarus, were each immigrants or the daughter of immigrants. They were bicultural, and bilingual, if not speakers of several languages."

Awards

Awards and accolades she has received include the 2014 Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship in Poetry, the 2012 Massachusetts Cultural Council Finalist in Poetry, Lesley University Faculty Development Grants, and a 2013 Black Metropolis Research Consortium Fellowship/Andrew W. Mellon Grant.

Bibliography

• Maroon (Curbstone Press, 2001)
• The Dear Remote Nearness of You (Barrow Street, 2016)