Ready to Burst

 • Author Bio: Born in 1936 in Ravine-Sèche, Haiti, Frankétienne is a prolific novelist, painter, playwright, musician and poet. Widely recognized as Haiti's most important literary figure and an outspoken challenger of political oppression, Frankétienne was a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009. The New York Times has called Frankétienne "the Father of Haitian Letters." He has a unique style, often blending French and Haitian Creole and inventing new words.

 • Translator: 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. Professor Glover's book, Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon (Liverpool UP 2010), addresses the general issue of canon formation in the francophone Caribbean and the particular fate of the Haitian Spiralist authors vis-à-vis this canon.