“My Haïti is torn and unsettled, haunted by memories of a paradise I could never see or inhabit again, because it either never existed but in my inner being’s sensibility, or it is gone for good. Life is movement. To hope for things to remain the same is to hope for death.” Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell
MARILÈNE PHIPPS-KETTLEWELL (formerly Marilène Phipps) is a painter, a poet and a short story writer who was born and grew up in Haiti. She has held fellowships at the Guggenheim Foundation, and at the Bunting Institute, the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research and the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University, and has been a recipient of a grant from the New England Foundation for the Arts. In 1993, she won the Grolier prize for poetry. Her poetry collection Crossroads and Unholy Water (Southern Illinois University Press, 2000) won the 1999 Crab Orchard Poetry Prize. (It was also a finalist for the Walt Whitman prize from the Academy of American Poets.) Her collection The Company of Heaven: Stories from Haiti won the 2010 Iowa Short Fiction Award, published by the University of Iowa Press.
Her work has appeared in magazines such as Callaloo, Ploughshares and River Styx and in the anthologies Sisters of Caliban: Contemporary Women Poets of the Caribbean (Azul Editions, 1996), The Beacon Best of 1999 (Beacon Press). Her poetry was published inEngland by Carcanet Press Ltd, England in a 2007 antholgy of 7 poets. Her short fiction was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2003, as well as listed in The Best American Short Stories 2001.