Anaïs Duplan

Anaïs Duplan (born 1992) is a queer and trans Haitian writer now based in the U.S., with three book publications from Action Books, Black Ocean Press, and Brooklyn Arts Press, along with a chapbook from Monster House Press. His work has been honored by a Whiting Award and a Marian Goodman fellowship from Independent Curators International. He is a Professor of postcolonial literature at Bennington College, of which he is also an alum.

Early life and education Duplan was born in Jacmel, Haiti. His writing about his father's absence from his childhood and how it impacted his understanding of gender norms was published in The Paris Review, He also lived in Cuba for several years. Eventually, after attending Rhode Island School of Design, Duplan graduated from Bennington College in 2014 and then the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 2017.

Career Duplan's poetry publications include the book Take This Stallion, published in 2016 by Brooklyn Arts Press, which Publishers Weekly wrote in a review "tactfully manages to stir the comical and casual into poems about pain, crippling emotional uncertainty, substance abuse, and death," and I Need Music, published in 2021 by Action Books. The latter received praise from poets Jericho Brown, Major Jackson, and Shane McCrae, as well as positive reviews from Literary Hub and Make. In 2016 his poem My Heart Like a Needle Ever True Turns to the Maid of Ebon Hue caught the attention of PBS, because of its focus on Civil War spy Mary Bowser. In June 2021, Duplan was the guest editor for the Academy of American Poets's Poem-a-Day series.

Duplan's 2017 chapbook, Mount Carmel & the Blood of Parnassus was inspired by his parents and how they have affected his work. after excerpts were published in Ploughshares and Hyperallergic. The nonfiction book discusses the meanings of transition and passing in regard to gender, including the irreversible effects of testosterone therapy. Hanif Abdurraqib called it "futuristic work," and a review in Colorado Review noted that its style is "as much theoretical as it is journalistic as it is in the style of manifesto." In 2022, Duplan received a Whiting Award for nonfiction, developed to give artists of color arts space after a fundraiser on Kickstarter. The first artists-in-residence while Duplan served as director were Yulan Grant, Terrence Nance, Krista Franklin. While at Iowa, Duplan met Tracie Morris, when they "both presented talks at Columbia University's More Than A Manifesto conference", and she later interviewed him about black sociality, academia, and influences for The Los Angeles Review of Books.

List of works

Books Take This Stallion (Brooklyn Art Press, 2016)

Exhibitions INNTERDISCPLINE, Friends and Lovers, Brooklyn, NY, 2019 Anonymous Donor, Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa, 2019 We Turn, EFA Project Space, New York, NY, 2021 We is Future (cancelled), Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany, 2023 2021 – Marian Goodman Fellowship 2022 – Whiting Award 2022 – Black Visionaries Award from Instagram and the Brooklyn Museum