Draft:Patrick Sylvain

Patrick Sylvain is a Haitian-American poet and professor. He earned his B.A. in Political Science and Social Psychology at University of Massachusetts, Boston. In 1988, he graduated from Harvard University with his Ed.M. in Political Science and Sociology where he was the James Bryant Conant Fellow. While at Harvard, he joined the Dark Room Collective. He received his M.F.A in Poetry at Boston University. He was the 2019-20 Evan Frankel Fellow at Brandeis University where he earned his Ph.D. in English in 2022. He has held faculty appointments at Harvard College and Brown University. He is currently serving as an Assistant Professor in the Literature and Writing Department at Simmons University.

His work has been published in African American Review, American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner and Massachusetts Review. He has cited writers Amitav Ghosh, Edwidge Danticat, and Zadie Smith, as authors whose work he is interested in.

He is currently working on the projects Haiti and Being: Vodoun, Zombies and the Plantation Continuum and Haiti: Scorched Pearl of the Antilles. His poetry collections, Butterfly wings: Zel papiyon, Love, Lust, & Loss: Lanmou, anvi, pédans, and Unfinished Dreams / Rèv San Bout are all bilingual and were written in both Haitian Creole and English.

In Carl E. James' review of Sylvain's book, Education Across Borders, co-authored with Jalene Tamerat and Marie Lily Cerat, James writes, "Education Across Borders is an invaluable resource not only for use in high school, college, and university classrooms by students and teachers, but for everyone. It provides essential and relevant insights into how colonialism, racism, and xenophobia has shaped the lives of Black youth in the United States and Canada."

Collections

 * Butterfly wings: Zel papiyon. 1 January 1994.
 * Love, Lust, & Loss: Lanmou, anvi, pédans. Mémoire D’encrier, 2005. ISBN 2923153383
 * Underworlds. Central Square Press, 30 July 2018. ISBN 978-1-941604-07-6
 * Unfinished Dreams / Rèv San Bout. JEBCA Editions, 29 December 2023. ISBN 1680841246

Short Stories

 * Yasmin's Collapsed World. Anchor Magazine, Issue 3, Spring 2015.
 * Angeline's Fragments. The Caribbean Writer, Vol.25, 2011.
 * Solino. The Caribbean Writer, Vol. 25, 2011.
 * Odette. Haiti Noir, Akashic Press, 2011.

Academic articles

 * Dominican Racism and the Contestation of Citizenship. SAIS: Europe Journal of Global Affairs, July 2022.
 * Introduction to Josué Azor. Aperture. [Future Gender]. Winter 2017.
 * Textual Pleasures and Violent Memories in Edwidge Danticat Farming of Bones. International Journal of Language and Literature. November 2014 (Vol. 2, No. 3).
 * Blood in Hispaniola: Citizenship, Sovereignty and Exclusion. West African Research Association. Boston University, Spring Newsletter 2014.
 * Darwish's Essentialist Poetics in a State of Siege. Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge. Fall 2009 (VII).
 * Heterodoxical Haiti and Structural Violence. Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge. Summer 2007 (V).
 * Death & Apathy at the Crossroads. Calabash: A Journal of Caribbean Arts and Letters. Fall 2002.

Books

 * Education Across Borders: Immigration, Race, Identity in the Classroom. Beacon Press, 22 February 2022. ISBN 978-0807052808