Overview:
Danielle Legros Georges, an acclaimed poet, translator, and educator, handed away on Feb. 11, 2025, at her dwelling in Dorchester, Massachusetts. A former Boston Poet Laureate and professor emerita at Lesley College, she was well known for her literary contributions, together with quite a few poetry collections and translations. She was 60.
PORT-AU-PRINCE — Danielle Legros Georges, a celebrated poet, translator, and educator, handed away peacefully on Feb. 11, 2025, at her dwelling in Dorchester, Massachusetts. She was surrounded by her family members, together with her accomplice, Tom Laughlin, and her brothers, Gérard, Bernard, and Stephan. She was 60.
A funeral service was held on Feb. 22 at Boston’s Basilica of Our Girl of Perpetual Assist, adopted by a graveside service at Forest Hills Cemetery.
Legros Georges was a prolific author and champion of Haitian tradition, identified for her deeply evocative poetry that explored themes of identification, migration, and historical past. She was the creator of a number of poetry collections, together with Three Leaves, Three Roots: Poems on the Haiti–Congo Story (2025), The Pricey Distant Nearness of You (2016), which received the New England Poetry Membership’s Sheila Margaret Motton E-book Prize, and Maroon (2001).
Born on Feb. 14, 1964, in Gonaïves, Haiti, to Rodney Georges, an engineer, and Edmonde Legros Georges, a secondary faculty trainer, she spent a part of her childhood within the Democratic Republic of Congo earlier than her household settled in Boston’s Mattapan neighborhood. She attended St. Angela’s Faculty and St. Claire’s Excessive Faculty, the place she excelled in lecturers and monitor and subject. A passionate dancer, she studied Afro-Haitian dance on the Elma Lewis Faculty of Effective Arts.
Legros Georges earned an undergraduate diploma from Emerson School and later obtained a Grasp of Effective Arts (MFA) in Poetry from New York College. She was an lively member of the Darkish Room Collective, a gaggle of Black artists and writers based mostly within the Boston-Cambridge space. In 2016, Emerson School awarded her an honorary Physician of Humane Letters diploma.
All through her profession, Legros Georges was devoted to schooling. She was a professor and director of the MFA in Artistic Writing program at Lesley College earlier than retiring as professor emerita in 2023. Her ardour for literature and advocacy for Haitian voices prolonged past academia.
In 2015, she was appointed because the Metropolis of Boston’s second Poet Laureate, serving within the function till 2019. She was additionally inducted into the American Antiquarian Society in 2024 and named a Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France’s Ministry of Tradition.
Past her personal poetry, she labored extensively as a translator and editor. She co-edited Wheatley at 250: Black Girls Poets Re-imagine the Verse of Phillis Wheatley Peters (2023) and edited Metropolis of Notions: An Anthology of Modern Boston Poems (2017). Her translations included Blue Flare: Three Haitian Poets (2024) and Island Coronary heart: The Poems of Ida Faubert (2021).
Legros Georges obtained quite a few honors and fellowships from organizations such because the American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Boston Basis, and the PEN/Heim Translation Fund.
“I do imagine {that a} poem ought to transfer the reader or listener. To ensure that it to do that, it should in its conception and/or development transfer its maker in some way—it should shift one thing in its maker. This connects to the poem as an area of inquiry for me.”
Danielle Legros Georges
Her official web site, https://www.daniellelegrosgeorges.com/, gives hyperlinks to her books and chosen works.
Donations in her reminiscence could also be made to the Mass Basic Most cancers Middle, 55 Fruit Avenue, Boston, MA 02114.
A Celebration of Life and Legacy was live-streamed for these unable to attend in particular person.
For these wishing to ship flowers or order memorial bushes in reminiscence of Danielle Legros Georges, please go to [funeral home link].