Patrick Sylvain is a
Haitian-American educator, poet, writer, social and literary critic, and
translator whose work explores Haiti and the Haitian diaspora’s culture,
politics, language, and religion. The author of several poetry collections in
English and Haitian, Sylvain’s poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize
and appear in leading journals including Ploughshares, Callaloo, Transition,
Prairie Schooner, Agni, American
Poetry Review, SpoKe, The Caribbean Writer, and African
American Review. His short stories are also widely published. He holds
degrees from UMass-Boston, Harvard, Boston University, and Brandeis University,
where he was the Shirle Dorothy Robbins Creative Writing Prize Fellow. Sylvain recently
taught Global, Transnational, and Postcolonial Literature at Simmons University
and served on Harvard’s History and Literature Tutorial Board. As of Fall 2026,
Sylvain is Associate
Professor in the Department of Women’s,
Gender, & Sexuality Studies, and Director of the minor in Human Rights at
UMass Boston.
His publications include Education Across Borders (Beacon Press, 2022)
and Underworlds (Central Square Press, 2018). Forthcoming works in 2026 include:
Scorched Pearl of the Antilles (Palgrave Macmillan) and poetry
collections from Arrowsmith Press (Fire on the Tongue), Finishing Line press (Habits
of Light), and Central Square Press (Unfinished
Dreams / Rèv San Bout).
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.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
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