AUTHOR PICTURES AND BIOS

Myriam J. A. Chancy is the author most recently of the novel Village

Weavers (Tin House), a Time Best Book of April 2024 and winner of the 2025 Fiction OCM Bocas Award in Caribbean Literature. Her work has received multiple awards including an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, the Guyana Prize in Literature, a Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award Gold Prize, and the Isis Duarte Book Prize. Her previous novel, What Storm, What Thunder, was named a "Best Book of 2021," by NPR, Kirkus, Library Journal, the Boston Globe, the Globe & Mail, shortlisted for the Caliba Golden Poppy Award & Aspen Words Literary Prize, longlisted for Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize & the OCM Bocas Prize. Her past novels include: The Loneliness of Angels, The Scorpion’s Claw and Spirit of Haiti. She is also the author of several academic books, including Harvesting Haiti: Reflections on Unnatural Disasters & Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women. Recent writings have appeared in Whetstone.com Journal, Electric Literature and Lit Hub. She is a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and HBA Chair of the Humanities at Scripps College in California.

Dr. Myriam J. A. Chancy is a literary scholar and novelist trained in British/Canadian and American literature/theory at the University of Manitoba (BA), Dalhousie University (MA) and the University of Iowa (Ph. D.). Her initial work as a professional focused on bringing into more prominence the work of Afro-Caribbean women. Her Ph. D. dissertation, published under the title Searching  for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile (Temple UP 1997), was the first academic monograph to argue for the examination of “exile” (a term then  largely applied only to male writers) in the writing of Caribbean women writers. This was soon followed by the groundbreaking Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women, 1934-1994 (Rutgers UP 1997), the foundational text for Haitian women’s studies. FS demonstrated not only the political importance of  Haitian women’s novels, which emerged first in response to the US Occupation of 1915-34, but also a tradition of Haitian women’s writing through  the mid-1990s. Dr. Chancy received early tenure in 1997, at the age of twenty-seven, on the strength of these first two book publications. Dr. Chancy became a full professor, after a brief departure from academia and the publication of several works of fiction, at 37, and received an Endowed Chair (which she still holds) at the age of 45. She became a fellow of the John S. Guggenheim Foundation in 2014 when she received the mid-career Guggenheim Fellowship in literary criticism.

If Chancy’s first academic books focused on specific regional issues across the Anglophone Caribbean and Haiti, her subsequent three academic books broadened to include hemispheric and global issues. From Sugar to Revolution: Women's Visions of Haiti, the DR and Cuba (Wilfred Laurier UP, 2013), as well as Harvesting Haiti: Reflections on Unnatural Disasters (University of Texas, 2023) place Haiti in the broader context of Caribbean and Latin American Studies. From Sugar to Revolution, widely cited and circulated, examines how writers situated in the Global North coming from the three island-nations tackle representation. It also articulates a means by which to make LGBTQ2+ realities legible. Harvesting Haiti, her collected essays on the post-earthquake situation in Haiti, examines international aid practices and, like From Sugar, examines the rift between the DR and Haiti, in this case, since the denationalization of Dominicans of Haitian descent in 2013; it was awarded the Isis Duarte Book Prize in 2024 from LASA and longlisted for the OCM Bocas Prize in the nonfiction category. Her Guggenheim awarded project,  Autochthonomies: Transnationalism, Testimony, and Transmission in the African Diaspora (UofIllinois, 2020), is situated as an intervention in race, Caribbean, African diasporic, and cultural studies by providing a new model for a culturally imbedded reading practice of contemporary works by  African and African diasporic artists; its purpose is to reveal the contributions to ontology that such artists deploy. In it, she suggests that we revise what we understand by terms such as “reason” and  “difference,” while also framing the production of African diasporic transnational cultural workers in their own terms, and situating them in intra-cultural conversations. 

Alongside academic projects, Dr. Chancy also produces novels in which she addresses the “surplus” or “excess” of research/concerns that cannot be readily addressed in academic works. Her first two novels, The Scorpion's Claw (2005) and Spirit of Haiti (2003) focused on discrete periods in Haitian history and the relationship of these to a contemporary moment while also addressing spiritual dimensions. Scorpion's Claw focused on the end of the Duvalier regime in 1986 and how young people coming of age in the years following the end of the thirty year regime engaged family and their political inheritance. Spirit of Haiti focused on the juxtaposition of the reign of King Christophe in the early 1800s in Northern Haiti with the coup of 1991; it is also the first novel to deal openly with LGBTQ+ themes as well as issues of sex work in the tourism industry within Haiti at the height of the AIDS crisis there. Spirit of Haiti was reissued in a 20th anniversary edition by SUNY Press in 2023 and received the Gold Prize Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award.

More recently, her novel What Storm, What Thunder (HarperCollins/Tin House 2021), dealt with the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake through 10 distinct narrative voices in a choral narrative that spans the US, Trinidad, Rwanda, Canada and the heart of Haiti itself in order to dissect the effects of the earthquake on the population across class, age, gender, and socioeconomic strata; it also examines aid practices in the aftermath of the earthquake which killed upwards of 300,000 and left 1.7 million people food and home insecure. WS, WT was named a Best Book of 2021 by numerous news outlets in the US and Canada, and was a finalist for the Aspen Prize and received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.

Her most recent offering, Village Weavers, a more “quiet” novel, also addresses the Haiti/DR rift through two main characters connected to both sides of the island and has the reader follow each character from 1940s Haiti to France at the time of the Algerian liberation movement, and through the DR and Haiti during the Trujillo/Duvalier years, through to migration to the US, until the early 2000s. Village Weavers was awarded the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize in Fiction.

Dr. Chancy’s goal with each of her academic and creative works is to tackle burning research questions and/or social issues in interdisciplinarily provocative and original ways and, in so doing, to invite and inspire other writers/scholars to do the same. She sees her function as a research academic and writer as one which adds to the archives to shift or fissure dominant discourses, and to transform them. Her chief interest has been in pushing the boundaries of the fields to shed light on lesser known voices or to closely examine fractious political and social issues and to create openings for future scholars to build on the scholarship in new directions.

Myriam J. A. Chancy is the author of several scholarly books and works of fiction, including most recently Village Weavers, and the widely acclaimed 2021 novel, What Storm, What Thunder. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and teaches in California.

Myriam J. A. Chancy is a Guggenheim Fellow and HBA Chair of the Humanities at Scripps College. She is the author of the Guggenheim-awarded book, Autochthonomies: Transnationalism, Testimony and Transmission in the African Diaspora, From Sugar to Revolution: Women’s Visions from Haiti, Cuba & The Dominican Republic, Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women, Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile, and her collected essays on the post-earthquake situation, Harvesting Haiti: Essays on Unnatural Disasters, which received the 2023 Isis Duarte Award from the Latin American Studies Association. She is also the author of four novels, among them  the Time Best book of April, Village Weavers, and What Storm, What Thunder, awarded an ABA Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and named a "Best Book of 2021," by NPR, Kirkus, the Chicago Public Library, the New York Public Library, Library Journal, the Boston Globe,  & Canada's Globe & Mail. She served as an editorial advisory board member for PMLA from 2010-12, as a Humanities Advisor for the Fetzer Institute from 2011-13, and as a 2018 advisor for the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.