This essay is in Ibbetson Street 57--the latest issue of this Somerville-based magazine.

TRIBUTE TO DANIELLE LEGROS GEORGES (1964-2025)

By Martha Collins

When Danielle Legros Georges passed away earlier this year, I, like many others, lost a dear friend.

I met Danielle in the 1990s, when she was a participant in a summer translation workshop at the William Joiner Institute at UMass Boston. Some years later she became a colleague who taught that workshop herself and was instrumental in welcoming more writers of color into the Joiner community.

In the years between and beyond, I knew her as a writer whose stunning poems seamlessly fused the personal and the political; as a poetic innovator who took enormous risks in her work; as a researcher who transformed history into beautiful poems; as a translator who carefully brought the important work of Haitian women poets to our attention; as a social activist whose work on behalf of others extended far beyond her written work; and as a friend with whom I shared both deep sadness and grief, and abundant laughter and joy—a woman who shared herself and her many gifts both deeply and widely.

Born in Haiti and raised in Boston, Danielle graduated from Emerson College, earned her MFA in Creative Writing from New York University, and served as Professor and later Director of the Creative Writing MFA Program at Lesley University. She received numerous fellowships and awards, including an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from Emerson College, and in 2024 was inducted into the American Antiquarian Society and named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France’s Ministry of Culture.

Many of her awards and recognitions were also opportunities for service. As Boston’s Poet Laureate from 2015 until 2019, she worked tirelessly to bring poetry to the lives of ordinary Bostonians. She partnered with museums and libraries, sponsored poetry workshops for students and elders, collaborated with musicians and photographers, and brought poetry to the attention of the entire city through POETRY ON THE T, the innovative sidewalk installation Raining Poetry, City of Notions: An Anthology of Contemporary Boston Poems, and other projects. She was on the Board of Directors of the New England Poetry Club, for which she spearheaded the creation of two awards for BIPOC poets and projects, one of which is now named for her. She was also a valued member of the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston’s Artist Advisory Council, a founding member of the the Haitian Artists Assembly of Massachusetts (HAAM), and one of the lead editors of HAAM’s Anthology of Haitian Poets of Massachusetts. Her public service will extend beyond her lifetime, as it continues to touch people in the many communities she loved and served.

But Danielle will be remembered best and longest for her poems, which draw from all of these communities, small and large. She first explored her Haitian heritage, as well as her early life in Boston, in Maroon (2001). In The Dear Remote Nearness of You (2016), winner of the New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Margaret Motton prize, she created boldly experimental poems to deal with such disturbingly timely subjects as racism in Boston and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, as well as exquisite lyrics in praise of her friends and loves, her neighborhood and its people, her city and its surroundings.

A year later, she published the chapbook Letters from Congo, which included translations of letters her parents wrote from the Congo when they worked there in the 1960s. The chapbook was a precursor to her stunning full-length collection Three Leaves, Three Roots:

Poems on the Haiti–Congo Story, which was published less than a month before her passing and from which she gave an impressive number of readings during the final weeks of her life.

Expanding her territory beyond family stories into the histories of colonial and post-colonial Haiti and Congo required an enormous amount of research, and transforming it into dazzlingly memorable poems led Danielle into an ever-expanding reservoir of poetic innovation.

In her final published book, a chapbook completed before and published just months after her passing, Danielle continued to transform history into poetry as she turned once again to the city and region where she lived. Aided by research grants, Acts of Resistance to New England Slavery by Africans Themselves in New England took her far back into history as she continued to integrate documentary material into deeply moving lyrics.

Danielle’s adept adaptation of research into poems was paralleled by, and I think related to, her practice of literary translation. In the last years of her life, she translated and published two volumes of poems by Haitian women: Island Heart: The Poems of Ida Faubert (2021) and Blue Flare: Three Haitian Poets: Évelyne Trouillot, Marie-Célie Agnant, Maggy de Coster (2024). A similarly transformative work was Wheatley at 250: Black Women Poets Re-imagine the Verse of Phillis Wheatley Peters, co-edited with Bethany Artress White and published in 2023. I think it’s no accident that these books feature women poets. All of Danielle’s books, from the earliest on, include memorable portraits and mentions of women, and in her poetic accounts of the Haiti- Congo connection and New England slavery, she was careful, as history often is not, to focus on women as much as men.

As in her poems, so in her friendships. Even in the darkest times, knowing Danielle Legros Georges was a joy. I miss her. I will always miss her. But I will always have her poems