Commissioned by UNICEF as a set of short biographical notices, Jasmine Narcisse's collection grew out of her discovery that she could say little about Haitian women beyond commonplaces. She describes searching the available literature and finding historians who mention women only as adjuncts, a few earlier compilations of uneven rigour, and living memory as her main resource, which sent her to interviews with her subjects and their relatives. The portraits move from Anacaona, whose standing as a poet survives although not one of her areytos does, through an entry for the unnamed women of the risings against slavery, to novelists, broadcasters and singers of the twentieth century, each notice built from cited historians and from conversation. Narcisse frames the whole as a warning about how quickly an unrecorded past vanishes, and treats the recovery of these lives as a way of prompting readers to act.