Myriam J. A. Chancy

Myriam J. A. Chancy (born 1970) is a Haitian-Canadian-American writer and a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. , she is 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 Guyana Prize for Literature Caribbean Award and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.

Early life Chancy was born and raised in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, before relocating during childhood to Quebec City, Canada, and then to Winnipeg. She attended the University of Manitoba, 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. Chancy served on the editorial advisory board for the Journal of the Modern Language Association from 2010 to 2012 and on the Advisory Council in the Humanities of the Fetzer Institute from 2011 to 2013.

Spirit of Haiti (2003), her first novel, was a Commonwealth Prize finalist. It was followed by The Scorpion's Claw. Chancy's third novel, The Loneliness of Angels was the 2011 recipient of the Guyana Prize in Literature Caribbean Award for Best Fiction.

Clancy's academic work Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile (1997) served as one of the first books to address exile as a defining aspect of Afro-Caribbean women's experiences. Her second 1997 book, Framing Silence, was the first book-length study devoted to Haitian women's literature as a field of analysis. Framing Silence examined six writers: Mme. Virgil Valcin, Annie Desroy, Nadine Magloire, Marie Vieux-Chauvet, Jan J. Dominique, Anne-christine d'Adesky and Edwidge Danticat. Chancy was granted early tenure on the basis of these two books.

She published From Sugar to Revolution: Women's Visions of Haiti, Cuba and the Dominican Republic in 2012 and received the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship for Literary Criticism in 2014. In 2021, her novel on the 2010 Haiti earthquake, What Storm, What Thunder, was published by Harper Collins Canada and Tin House. It was shortlisted for the Caliba Golden Poppy Award, and the Aspen Words Literary Prize.

Her 2024 novel Village Weavers was the overall winner of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. 2025: Overall winner of OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature