A Presentation of Frankétienne’s Ready to Burst

Archipelago Books is celebrating the release of Ready To Burst by Frankétienne, translated from the French by Kaiama L. Glover…

Please join Archipelago Books and the Haiti Cultural Exchange for a presentation of Ready to Burst by Frankétienne.

The launch event will feature a conversation with Frankétienne, translator of Ready to Burst Kaiama L. Glover, and author Madison Smartt Bell. This event is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

“His work can speak to the most intellectual person in the society as well as the most humble. It’s a very generous kind of genius he has, one I can’t imagine Haitian literature ever existing without.”  — Edwidge Danticat

“The ‘burst’ in ‘Ready to Burst’ also announces the eruption onto the scene of one of literature’s great figures […] a magician of technique and feeling, in the tradition of a great family of writers like James Joyce, João Guimarães Rosa et Osman Lins.” — Rafael Lucas

“Each of Frankétienne’s words builds a world of which every Haitian dreams.” — Emmelie Prophete

Considered by many to be the ‘father of Haitian letters,’ Frankétienne is a prolific poet, novelist, visual artist, playwright, musician, and ‘spiraliste.’ He writes in both French and Haitian Creole and often juggles the two. His paintings have been exhibited internationally. An outspoken challenger of political oppression, Frankétienne was a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009 and, in 2010, was named a Commandeur dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Kaiama L. Glover received a B.A. in French History and Literature and Afro-American Studies from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in French and Romance Philology from Columbia University. She is now an associate professor of French at Barnard College. Her book, Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon, explores the Haitian Spiralist movement. She sits on the editorial boards of the Romanic Reviewand Small Axe and regularly contributes to The New York Times Book Review.

Madison Smartt Bell is the author of thirteen novels. Bell’s eighth novel, All Soul’s Rising, was a finalist for the 1995 National Book Award and the 1996 PEN/Faulkner Award and winner of the 1996 Anisfield-Wolf award for the best book of the year dealing with matters of race. All Souls Rising, along with the second and third novels of his Haitian Revolutionary trilogy, is available in a uniform edition from Vintage Contemporaries. Toussaint Louverture: A Biography was published by Pantheon in 2007. A graduate of Princeton University and Hollins College, he has taught in various creative writing programs, including the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. Since 1984 he has taught in the Goucher College Creative Program, where he is currently Professor of English. In 2008 he received the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Our immense gratitude to the Brooklyn Public Library and the Haiti Cultural Exchange for their generous support.