Myriam J. A. Chancy

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Myriam Chancy

Myriam J. A. Chancy (born 1970) is a Haitian-Canadian writer and a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation since 2014. She is currently the Hartley Burr Alexander Chair of Humanities at Scripps College of the Claremont Consortium. As a writer, she focuses on Haitian culture, gender, class, sexuality, and Caribbean women's studies. Her novels have won several awards, including the prestigious Guyana Prize in Literature Caribbean Award.

Early life

Chancy was born and raised in Port-au-Prince, Haiti before relocating during childhood to Quebec City, Canada. She attended the University of Manitoba in Manitoba, Canada, where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Philosophy with Honors. Following that, she received her master's degree in English Literature from Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada, where she wrote her thesis on “James Baldwin and the Dissolution of the Color Line.” She received her Ph.D. in English at the University of Iowa in 1994.

Career

Chancy has held several positions in academia over the course of her lifetime. From 2002 until 2004, she served as the Editor-in-Chief of the academic arts journal Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, receiving the Phoenix Award for Editorial Achievement from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.. She has taught English and Women's Studies at Vanderbilt University as an assistant professor, at Arizona State University as an associate professor, and at Louisiana State University. Additionally, she has held visiting professorships at both Smith College and the University of California, Santa Barbara. She formerly taught at the University of Cincinnati as a Professor of Africana Studies, where she taught courses in African Diaspora Studies, Caribbean Literature, Postcolonial Literature and Theory, Feminist Theory and Women’s Studies, and Creative Writing of Fiction. Chancy's expertise is in Caribbean and Haitian social justice issues and she frequently contributes to journals, university presses, and national tenure review. Currently, Chancy serves on the editorial advisory board for the Journal of the Modern Language Association, the Advisory Council in the Humanities of the Fetzer Institute, and the Journal of Haitian Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

In addition to her current position at Scripps College, Chancy is in the process of writing her fourth novel which will discuss both national and individual traumas in Haiti, Rawnda, and the United States. Spirit of Haiti is her first novel and was a Commonwealth Prize Finalist, which she followed with her second novel The Scorpion’s Claw. Chancy's third novel third novel, The Loneliness of Angels was the 2011 recipient of the Guyana Prize in Literature Caribbean Award for Best Fiction. Her work Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile served as one of the first books to address exile as defining aspect of Afro-Caribbean women's experiences. Chancy was granted early tenure because of the successes of Searching For Safe Spaces and Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women.

Literary works

• Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women (Rutgers University Press, 1997)
• Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile (Temple University Press, 1997)
• Spirit of Haiti (London: Mango Publications, 2003)
• The Scorpion’s Claw (Peepal Tree Press, 2005)
• The Loneliness of Angels (Peepal Tree Press, 2010)
• From Sugar to Revolution: Women’s Visions of Haiti, Cuba and the Dominican Republic (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2012)

Awards

• 1998 - Outstanding Academic Book Award by Choice for Searching for Safe Spaces
• 2004 - Phoenix Award for Editorial Achievement from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals
• 2011 - Guyana Prize in Literature Caribbean Award (Best Fiction) for The Loneliness of Angels

External links

• Official website