Edited by Daut and Glover, this volume gathers contributors to map Haitian writing from before independence to the present. Its span runs from pre-revolutionary texts and the first stirrings of letters in Haitian Creole, through a long nineteenth century conducted largely in French, to work being written today in English.

The organizing idea is that Haitian literature cannot be read without its political, cultural, and historical scaffolding, and the chapters supply that context alongside the readings. Coverage takes in poets, playwrights, and novelists working in Haiti and across its far-flung diasporas, among them Baron de Vastey, Juste Chanlatte, Demesvar Delorme, René Depestre, Dany Laferrière, Edwidge Danticat, Kettly Mars, and Évelyne Trouillot.

What emerges is a portrait of a tradition that is multilingual by nature and transnational in reach, running from antislavery pamphlets of the 1800s to fiction about ecological ruin, and engaged throughout with the wider conversations of world letters.