1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
P.S.: My first full collection, Zansèt (Ancestors), written in Haitian Creole in 1994, marked a turning point in my life. At the time, I was a member of the Dark Room Collective, a public school teacher in Cambridge, and deeply engaged in activism around democracy and human rights. I set out to write a book that would embrace the full essence of poetry without retreating from the political. I wanted to experiment with language and offer an aesthetic that departed from what many Haitian readers expected.
The book became, in many ways, a hybrid form—merging American poetics, which tend toward the imagistic, exploratory, and personal, with Franco-Haitian traditions that are philosophical, surrealist-leaning, and socially engaged. Its reception, including the generous preface by Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassègue, the former Haitian Minister of Information and Culture, affirmed for me that I could dwell seriously in the craft. It gave me permission to see myself as a poet.
Fire on the Tongue, by contrast, reflects a more elastic and mature poetic consciousness. If my early work emerged from instinct and urgency, this later work arises from a deeper sense of intentionality and self-possession. But that evolution has not been linear. What I once understood as personal growth has revealed itself to be inseparable from history, displacement, and the political conditions that shaped my earliest awareness. This collection engages themes of identity, memory, exile, and cultural buoyancy. It navigates immigration, adaptation, loss, and self-understanding—what it means to live with two feet on different soils. While grounded in a Haitian-American experience, the work seeks resonance with the broader condition of migration and belonging.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, non-fiction or fiction?
P.S.: I came to poetry at fifteen, through love and through history. I fell deeply for a girl who had just moved into my neighborhood in Port-au-Prince. Like many adolescents, I discovered language through longing—the way words could carry desire, absence, and imagination.
At the same time, I was coming of age under the dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier. I began writing with what I think of now as a split tongue: privately composing poems of resistance against the regime, and love poems for the girl who stirred me profoundly. From the beginning, poetry became a space where intimacy and politics converged.
Over time, poetry ceased to be merely an artistic practice and became a mode of consciousness—a way of testing truth against lived experience.
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
P.S.: I write almost every day. As I’ve grown older, I find myself demanding more rigor from my own language. I’m deeply interested in how words act upon the psyche, how they shape and are shaped by our collective human experience.
My process is iterative. I move through multiple drafts, often beginning with fragments—images, phrases, tonal gestures. These fragments function as building blocks. Over time, they begin to suggest an internal architecture, an image system that the poem is trying to construct into a coherent whole. The work rarely arrives fully formed; it is built, dismantled, and rebuilt.
4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
P.S.: A poem often begins with an image or a pressure—a moment that refuses to remain silent. Sometimes, it is a line, other times a rhythm, or a memory that insists on being revisited.
I tend to write individual poems that later reveal themselves as part of a larger constellation. Only after writing do I begin to see how they speak to one another, how they might belong to the same emotional or conceptual landscape. In that sense, the “book” emerges retrospectively, as an act of listening and arrangement rather than premeditated design.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
P.S.: Public readings are both an extension of and a counterpoint to the private act of writing. Writing is solitary, interior, often slow. Readings return the poem to the body—to voice, breath, and community.
I value readings because they allow me to hear the poem differently, to experience its cadence in real time, and to witness how it lives in the presence of others. At the same time, the performance aspect can feel at odds with the inwardness of composition. I inhabit both spaces, recognizing that poetry ultimately belongs to both silence and sound.
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
P.S.: Yes. My work is driven by questions about language, history, and consciousness. I am interested in how language both reveals and obscures truth, how it carries memory, and how it can resist or reproduce structures of power.
I often ask: What does it mean to speak authentically within inherited systems of language? How does one write from within displacement without reducing it to metaphor? What is the relationship between personal memory and collective history?
The current questions, for me, revolve around belonging, migration, and the ethics of representation in a fractured world (even a corrupt one. Corruption is a form of moral pollution).
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
P.S.: The writer still has a role, though it is neither singular nor fixed. At its most vital, writing bears witness. It interrogates dominant narratives, preserves memory, and creates space for alternative ways of seeing.
In a culture saturated with information, the writer’s task may be less about producing more content and more about deepening attention—slowing down perception, complicating easy truths, and resisting erasure.
The writer should remain accountable to both language and community.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
P.S.: Both. It can be difficult because writing is deeply personal, and revision often requires letting go of what one has grown attached to. But it is essential because an editor brings an external clarity—a different set of eyes attuned to structure, coherence, and possibility.
A good editor does not impose but reveals. They help the writer see the work more fully.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
P.S.: “Trust the poem, but do not trust your first impulse.” That advice has stayed with me because it honors intuition while insisting on discipline—it reminds me that the initial spark matters, but it must be tested and refined through craft and revision.
Yusef Komunyakaa often echoed a similar balance when he said, “write with your heart, and edit with your mind.” I remember him once, sitting outside the Carpenter Center on Quincy Street at Harvard, saying, “allow yourself to be surprised by what the poem is revealing, and don’t force it to reveal something that the voice in the poem did not ask of it.” That idea—of discovery rather than control—continues to shape how I approach writing.
When I sit down to write, I often feel the presence of both Robert Pinsky and Komunyakaa not too far off in my cognitive and poetic distance, as reminders to balance instinct with intention, and openness with precision.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to academic prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
P.S.: Moving between poetry and academic prose is both challenging and generative. Each genre demands a different relationship to language—poetry privileges compression and resonance, while academic prose requires clarity, argument, and exposition.
The appeal lies in the tension. Each form sharpens the other. Poetry deepens my sensitivity to language; scholarship disciplines my thinking.
11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
P.S.: I don’t follow a strict routine, but I write daily, usually late at night or very early in the morning. Those hours offer a kind of quiet that allows language to surface more freely.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
P.S.: I return to reading—poetry, philosophy, history. I also return to memory, to lived experience. Sometimes I step away from writing altogether and allow silence to do its work.
Stagnation is often a sign that something deeper is asking to be understood.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
P.S.: The scent of salt air mixed with dust after rain. Also the smell of coffee brewing early in the morning—those sensory traces carry me back to Haiti, to childhood, to a sense of rootedness that persists despite distance. Hibiscus flowers as well.
14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
P.S.: Music, visual art, and history deeply inform my work. Music, especially, shapes my sense of rhythm and tonal variation. Visual art influences how I think about imagery and composition. Even scientific thought—its precision and curiosity—can enter the way I approach language.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
P.S.: Writers who engage both the lyrical and the political have been central to my development—those who refuse to separate aesthetics from history. I’m drawn to voices that challenge language while remaining accountable to lived experience.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
P.S.: I would love to learn how to fly—either a plane or a helicopter. There is something about flight that speaks to freedom, perspective, and risk.
17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
P.S.: I am already an educator, which I value deeply. Teaching keeps me grounded in language and in dialogue. If I had not taken this path, I might have become a lawyer. I’m drawn to rhetoric and the art of argument, though not to its more manipulative uses.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
P.S.: Writing, for me, is an act of consciousness. It is a way of recognizing the power of words and confronting the histories and structures that shape human life. That awareness compels a responsibility—to witness, to testify, and to seek a form of release from the weight of history. To write is to pursue truth beyond the self. Writing, ultimately, is a form of freedom.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
P.S.: I’m currently reading Fearless by Tracy K. Smith, Imagination: A Manifesto by Ruha Benjamin, and Vision and Difference by Griselda Pollock. I move between these and poetry collections.
As for film, the last two that stayed with me were Sinners and One Battle After Another.
20 - What are you currently working on?
P.S.: I’m currently working on three projects: a poetry collection I’m revising, Port of Sorrow; an essay collection on Haitian poets under review with Bloomsbury; and a collection of short stories, some of which have already appeared in literary journals.
I tend to move between projects. When one form resists me, I shift into another—entering, as I think of it, a different house of language.
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