Anaïs Duplan (born 1992) is a Haitian writer now based in the U.S.,^[1] with three book publications from Action Books, Black Ocean Press, and Brooklyn Arts Press, respectively.^[2] His work has been honored by a Whiting Award^[3] and a Marian Goodman fellowship from Independent Curators International,^[4][5] and he is queer and trans.^[6]

Early life and education

Duplan was born in Jacmel, Haiti.^[1] He moved to the United States as a child and grew up in Boston and Brooklyn with his mother.^[7] 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,^[8] and he discussed his parents' impact on his work in an interview with The Rumpus.^[9] He also lived in Cuba for several years.^[10] Eventually, after attending Rhode Island School of Design, Duplan graduated from Bennington College in 2014^[11] and then the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 2017.^[12]

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,"^[13] and I NEED MUSIC, published in 2021 by Action Books.^[2][6] The latter received praise from poets Jericho Brown, Major Jackson, and Shane McCrae,^[14] as well as positive reviews from Literary Hub^[15] and Make.^[16] In June 2021, Duplan was the guest editor for the Academy of American Poets's Poem-a-Day series.^[17][18]

Duplan's first nonfiction book, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture, was published by Black Ocean Press in 2020 after excerpts were published in Ploughshares^[19] and Hyperallergic.^[20] The nonfiction book discusses the meanings of transition and passing in regard to gender, including the irreversible effects of testosterone therapy.^[19] Claudia Rankine listed it as a book she looked forward to reading in an interview with The New York Times,^[21] Hanif Abdurraqib called it "futuristic work,"^[22] 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."^[23] In 2022, Duplan received a Whiting Award for nonfiction,^[9] which NPR noted was a predictor of writers who would go on to become "household names".^[5] Vanity Fair noted Duplan's outfit at the award reception as a "spectacular jumpsuit".^[3]

In 2016, Duplan founded the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program^[8][24] developed to give artists of color arts space after a fundraiser on Kickstarter.^[25] The first artists-in-residence while Duplan served as director were Yulan Grant, Terrence Nance, Krista Franklin.^[25] In 2021, the center started new collaborations with Iowa City, including murals, interviews, and performances.^[26] 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.^[12] Duplan was also interviewed for the New York City Trans Oral History Project, in conjunction with New York Public Library's oral history project.^[10] He has been teaching at Bennington College, his alma mater, since 2021. Since 2022 Duplan has worked as a guest curator at the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany. He was responsible for the development of the exhibition chapter on "Afrofuturism" as part of the exhibition "We is Future - Visions of New Communities". The museum terminated the contract around a week before the opening on 24 November 2023. It justified the move by saying that Duplan had published several anti-Semitic posts on his Instagram account in the preceding weeks. In them, he supported the anti-Israel movement BDS.^[27]

References