Afro-Caribbean Men: Stories of Triumph & Empowerment Part II

Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, M.J. Fievre is a longtime educator and writer. A seasoned K–12 teacher, she has taught creative writing workshops to children at the O Miami Poetry Festival and the Miami Art Museum, and at schools in Santa Cruz de la Sierra (Bolivia), Port-au-Prince (Haiti), and South Florida. She is also the coordinator of Miami Book Fair’s ReadCaribbean program and directs and produces the children’s cultural show Taptap Krik? Krak! Young Trailblazers: The Book of Black Inventors and Scientists (Dragonfruit), a collaborative project with illustrator Kim Balacuit, is a salute to Black pioneers in literature, entertainment, science, education, business, military, sports, spirituality, and more. It’s a journey populated by figures we know – such as Katherine Johnson, George Washington Carver, and Madam C.J. Walker – but many we don’t. Consider James West, a critical figure in the invention of the microphone, or Garrett Morgan, who invented the traffic signal.

Patrick Lemoine spent his childhood near the Bois-de-Chêne slum, located in the center of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, near the National Palace. He lived in the U.S. in the 1960s and eventually settled back in Haiti, where he started a family and managed a small manufacturing company until his arrest in 1971, shortly after Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier's ascent to power. Lemoine spent six years in prison before being released in 1977, thanks to the efforts of the Jimmy Carter administration, and expelled from the country. He is currently a member of the management team for an airline company. First published in French in 1996, later published in English, revised and augmented in 1999, Patrick Lemoine’s Fort-Dimanche, Fort-La-Mort/Fort Dimanche, Dungeon of Death (Trafford Publishing) is a poignant testimony of his years spent in the jails of Fort-Dimanche under Duvalier's regime. It bears witness to the extraordinary capacity of a man to face adversity and horror while fighting to maintain his dignity. Filmmaker and producer Jonathan Demme said “Fort-Dimanche, Dungeon of Death is a vivid memory of the most horrendous kind of mental and physical cruelties that we can inflict on our fellow man. [It] will stand as a constant reminder that our basic freedoms, when taken for granted, can be trampled by the very ones elected or selected among us to be sentinels of society."