Michèle Voltaire Marcelin: Part Two
No Masks. No Apologies.
Part Two of the InnerView with Michèle Voltaire Marcelin was challenging
. She is brutally honest. Persistent. She tends to answer questions with questions of her own. Caustic ones, at times. She’s searching for a certain truth. She dreams with her eyes wide open. She has known both the sharp and dull edges of real and make-believe knives. She survived to tell. Now, she laughs at it all — a sometime sad and sometime happy laugh that reverberates long after she’s gone.
Michèle Voltaire Marcelin: Life Always Triumphs
Michèle Voltaire Marcelin is a writer, poet, performer, and visual artist who has lived in Haiti, Chile and the United States.
Her first novel, La Désenchantée, was published in 2006. Since then, she has published its Spanish translation, La Desencantada, as well as two other books of poetry and prose: Lost and Found, and Amours et Bagatelles– which was recently translated to Spanish and which she presented this February at the International Book Fair of Havana, Cuba.
Michele’s work is also included in two poetry anthologies published in France :Terre de Femmes (Editions Bruno Doucey) and Cahier Haiti by Revue d’Art, Littérature et Musique.
Maya Angelou declared her poems “stunning” in an interview on OprahRadio:
Haitian Poet Michele Voltaire Marcelin – Audio – Oprah.com
http://www.oprah.com/oprahradio/Haitian-Poet-Michele-Voltaire-Marcelin-Audio
Author Edwidge Danticat wrote: “The seventy-four poems in Michèle Voltaire Marcelin’s “Lost and Found” are as sensual as they are lyrical, as tender as they are incandescent. Make sure you are sitting down, or better yet lying down, with your beloved and a glass of wine, as you read them. Your heart — and your love life — will never be the same.”
Michèle recently read her poetry at the International Miami Book Fair along side Paul Farmer, Salman Rushdie, and Edwidge Danticat. She’s been featured as one of the poets of the NewsHour on PBS and interviewed by CNN Español.
She has performed her poetry solo and with jazz bands at the Brooklyn Museum , the MoCADA, La MaMa theatre, Cornelia Street Cafe, the United Nations, the Segal Theatre, and most recently at UCLA with Jonathan Demme, Maggie Steber, Mark Denner in Haiti Stories.
She has shared the stage with artistic luminaries Emeline Michel, Manno Charlemagne, Buyu Ambroise, Beethova Obas, Jessica St.Vil of KanuDance. Her artwork has been exhibited at the MoCADA, the African-American Museum of L.I., The Cork Gallery at Lincoln Center and the Mupanah in Haiti.
This Port-au-Prince born artist writes in 3 languages and currently lives and teaches in New York.
Markus Schwartz: Denmark Meets Haiti
New InnerView
Master percussionist and bona fide tanbourinè, Markus Schwartz, reflects on his own private Haiti and his relationship with “the oldest instrument after the human voice.”
Markus was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, but a part of him is deeply rooted in Haitian culture. In English or in impeccable Kreyòl, he is direct and unpretentious. He speaks with reverence for the instrument he spent the last two decades studying. Although he has performed and recorded with top Haitian artists Beethova Obas, Emeline Michel, and Wyclef Jean, Markus always refers to himself as a student.
Of his first introduction to the tanbou, Markus says: “I don’t think anything happens by chance. In West African tradition, they might call it Fa. Your life has a map. It’s not an unalterable course, but I do believe certain things are placed in your path either to help you achieve your goals or to help move you from one period of your life to another.”