“I write you these words not knowing whether you will receive them, when you will receive them, and whether I will still be alive when you read them …”
—Danielle Legros Georges, from My Beloved Companion
Danielle Legros Georges, the Haitian-American poet, translator, and educator, passed away on February 11, 2025, at the age of 60. Throughout her life, she deftly wove her Haitian heritage into the fabric of her work, exploring the complex intersections of memory, exile, and identity. A poet of the diaspora, Legros Georges’ writing holds the weight of history while confronting the challenges of being both inside and outside of a culture.
In her poetry, language itself becomes an act of resistance—an act of remembering and reclaiming.
Born in Gonaïves, Haiti, in 1965, Legros Georges emigrated to the United States at the age of eight, settling in Boston. From this early age, her life became an oscillation between two worlds—Haiti, a country she could only remember through fragments of language, scent, and sound, and America, a place where identity felt like something to be both crafted and constantly negotiated. This duality would mark her entire creative life.
Legros Georges studied at Emerson College in Boston, majoring in Communication Studies, before earning a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from New York University.
Her academic career was defined by an enduring commitment to the arts, but also to the notion of art as a vehicle for social engagement and healing. It was at NYU that she began to seriously engage with poetry, and her work began to reflect her complex engagement with language—both as a means of expression and as a tool for cultural reclamation.
Danielle Legros Georges was not only a poet but also a mentor, an advocate for the arts, and a community leader. As a professor in the Creative Arts in Learning Division at Lesley University, she helped to shape the literary careers of many, offering guidance to students who, like her, inhabited multiple identities.
She taught with the belief that writing could be transformative, offering individuals the tools to process trauma, navigate exile, and articulate complex experiences of cultural hybridisation.
Her dedication to the arts was not confined to the classroom. As Boston’s poet laureate from 2015 to 2019, Legros Georges transformed the role from an honourary title into a conduit for public engagement. She established workshops for under-represented communities, particularly focusing on the elderly, refugees, and at-risk youth, demonstrating her belief that poetry was not just an art form but a vital form of social expression.
In her role as poet laureate, she once said, “Poetry, for me, is not a luxury; it is a necessity, a way to reach out and touch the threads of the city that too often go unseen, unspoken.” Her work as a laureate was a testament to her belief in poetry’s ability to act equally as a mirror and map—reflecting the complexities of her city’s voices while helping to chart the territory of its collective memory.
Legros Georges’ poetry was suffused with the themes of displacement and memory. Her debut collection, Maroon (2001), explored the intricate ways in which the legacies of colonialism, exile, and belonging intersected. The title itself—referring to the runaway slaves who formed independent communities—evoked both the strength of the Haitian people but also the notion of being in perpetual motion, searching for roots while navigating the disorienting experience of diaspora.
In Maroon, she writes, “A leaf falls in the distance, I hear it touch the ground, and in the air, a voice calls to me, but I do not answer. I am the sum of these silences, these echoes of my ancestors’ past.”
The leaf falling, distant and imperceptible, serves as a metaphor for the long, quiet echoes of history that resonate in the present. The poem reflects the poet’s internal struggle to reconcile the space between her Haitian past and her American present, between the silence of history and the voice that tries, against the odds, to speak.
This tension between memory and forgetting pervades her later works as well. The Dear Remote Nearness of You (2016), which won the New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize, takes up the themes of absence and longing with a haunting delicacy.
The poems in this collection reflect a personal landscape where distance is both geographical and emotional and where the need to bridge these gaps through memory becomes a central preoccupation.
In the poem “I Carry You,” she wrote, “I carry you in the folds of my breath, in the spaces between seconds, in the tears I’ve never shed. Each memory of you is a knot in my throat.” Here, Legros Georges evokes the intimacy of memory—the way it occupies the body, becomes part of the very breath and the pulse. This poem is an embodiment of diaspora itself, the constant internal negotiation of distance and closeness, presence and absence.
The speaker’s struggle to articulate the ineffable, to make palpable the intangible feelings of grief, is something that reverberates deeply in the hearts of those who know what it is to be torn between two homes, two histories, and two selves.
Her 2021 translation of Island Heart: The Poems of Ida Faubert introduced English-speaking readers to the work of the Haitian-French poet Faubert. Faubert’s work, deeply tied to the experience of exile and the fragmented self, finds a kindred spirit in Legros Georges’ own work, which always hovered between the act of remembering and the challenge of making memory endure.
Legros Georges often spoke about translation as an act of “uncovering”, where one must engage deeply with the text, unravel its layers, and reassemble it so that it might speak anew to another audience.
Released shortly before her death, Three Leaves, Three Roots: Poems on the Haiti-Congo Story (2025) was a culmination of Legros Georges’ lifelong engagement with the diaspora and the African heritage that threads through it. The collection is a meditation on the historical and cultural ties between Haiti and the Congo, two nations shaped by the legacies of colonialism, enslavement, and resistance.
The poems in Three Leaves, Three Roots reflect her ongoing concern with the interconnectedness of African diasporic histories, but also with the individual struggle to reconcile these histories with a personal narrative. In her poem “The Roots Remember,” she writes, “These roots were planted long before we arrived; they grew in silence, and when the storms came, they held fast, undisturbed. We too are like them—silent, holding fast.”
In this final work, the poet embraces the metaphor of the root, deeply rooted in both time and place, a symbol of survival through countless historical storms. The roots that “hold fast” are a symbol of resilience, not merely of survival but of endurance across generations. Through these poems, Legros Georges highlights how history itself—both individual and collective—is a force that endures, quietly but powerfully shaping who we are.
Legros Georges’ legacy is also steeped in her advocacy for the democratisation of art. In her poet laureate role, she consistently emphasised poetry’s role as a communal act. “Poetry is not a luxury,” she once remarked, “it is a necessity—an essential means of expression for the silenced, the marginalised, and the forgotten.”
The late poet’s belief that her work could be a tool for social change led her to forge a path where art and activism were deeply intertwined. Her poetry was both a reflection of her own experiences and a call to action, a reminder that poetry can be both personal and collective, a vehicle of reflection, and a vehicle for change.
Danielle Legros Georges’ poetry, rooted in the duality of her experience as a Haitian-American, will continue to speak to the heart of diaspora and belonging.
Her work is a testament to the endurance of culture and memory and to the importance of creating spaces in which the past is never truly gone but lives on in the form of language, experience, and story.
Danielle Legros Georges’ death leaves a void that no elegy can fill. Her poetry, an act of reclamation and memory, will remain not as an echo but as an enduring voice—quiet, unyielding, and alive with the weight of history. In her words, she made the silences of exile speak.
In “The Roots Remember,” she wrote, “These roots were planted long before we arrived; they grew in silence, and when the storms came, they held fast, undisturbed.
We too are like them—silent, holding fast.” Her work, steeped in the complexities of displacement, transcends the personal to offer a universal language of survival.
The writers and poets of T&T join the wider literary world in mourning her death.
The Bocas Lit Fest, echoing the sentiments of writers and poets of T&T, the region, and the globe, was “stunned and saddened” by the loss of Legros Georges whose words will remain as her gift of both resistance and remembrance.
Ira Mathur is a Guardian Media journalist and winner of the 2023 Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction for her memoir, Love The Dark Days. Website: www.irasroom.org. Author inquiries: irasroom@gmail.com
