Jacques Stephen Alexis had already gained international recognition for his fiction when he returned to Haiti from Cuba in 1961 as part of a small invasion force. He disappeared and presumably died at the hands of Duvalier's Tontons Macoutes at the age of thirty-nine.
Carrol F. Coates is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the State University of New York, Binghamton. He has translated numerous books, including The Festival of the Greasy Pole, by Rene Depestre, and Dignity, by Jean-Bertrand Aristide, both published by the University Press of Virginia.