We were stunned to hear that Haitian writer, visual artist, and performer Michèle Voltaire Marcelin passed away on April 29, 2026. May she rest in peace. Jocelyn McCalla has requested that people use a biography by Sophie Mariñez, published in the Oxford Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography in 2016 (and therefore, missing the year of death, 2026). We respect his wishes by sharing the full bio below. [Also see “Pour saluer la mémoire de Michèle Voltaire Marcelin, poétesse, peintre, romancière et comédienne,” by Robert Berrouët-Oriol — a short article to honor her memory in Rezo Nòdwès.]
Marcelin, Michèle Voltaire (1955–), performer, writer, visual artist, and poet, was born Michèle Voltaire in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Details about her parents are scarce but stifled by the middle-class conformity of her family and social circle, she left Haiti in 1971 for Santiago, Chile, to join her brother Frantz Voltaire, a university student and teacher.
Michèle attended public school in Santiago until the 1973 coup d’état against the left-wing government of Salvador Allende brought her new start to a quick, violent end. Military police raided the Voltaire home in search of incriminating evidence and found several of their friends who had decided to spend the night with the family. Deciding all were part of a conspiracy, the police arrested them, placing them in a van headed toward Chile’s national soccer stadium, which would become an infamous site at which many alleged dissidents were tortured and executed. Released three days later, she moved to New York, where she would later begin her literary and artistic career.
Voltaire Marcelin earned a B.F.A. from the Leonard Davis Center for the Performing Arts at the City University of New York and an M.S. from the New School for Social Research. She staged Walking on Fire, a monologue performed at the Alliance of Resident heaters, based on Beverley Bell’s stories of survival and resistance of Haitian women. She performed the role of “Marie-Ange” in Simone Schwarz-Bart’s play Ton Beau Capitaine, directed by Françoise Kourilsky, at the Ubu Repertory Theatre. She also performed in The Vagina Monologues, directed by Chuck Patterson, at the Brooklyn Museum. In February 2009 she played the role of the “Republic of Haiti” in Entrées et Sorties by Carmelle St. Gérard-Lopez at the Producer’s theater in New York City. Other credits include William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life, staged by Robert Macbeth and Israel Washington, and Van Italie’s Comings and Goings, directed by Rhea Gaisner.
In film, she worked with Haitian directors, notably Raoul Peck in Haitian Corner (1988) and The Man on the Shore (1993), which examined Haiti’s dictatorial Duvalier regimes. She also appeared in Patricia Benoit’s Se Met Ko (1989), a film dealing with AIDS in the Haitian community and Benoit’s Stones in the Sun, a film about Haitian exiles in New York, also starring the writer Edwige Danticat, which premiered at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival.
Voltaire Marcelin writes in French, English, Haitian Creole, and Spanish. Her first novel La Désenchantée (2006), and its Spanish version La Desencantada, received wide critical acclaim. Set under the François “Papa Doc” Duvalier dictatorship (1957–1971), the novel delves into the narrator’s past, exploring a family universe dominated by strong characters and affected by the cruelty, violence, and despair of the time. Marked by the narrator’s particularly poetic voice, the text honors all-time favorite authors with quotes from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Éluard, Jack Kerouac, Simone Weil, and Charles Baudelaire, among others, that emphasize the lyrical and emotional import of the story. La Désenchantée was soon followed by two books of poetry: Lost and Found and Amours et Bagatelles (2009), the latter of which was translated into Spanish as Amores y cosas sin importancia (2009).
Voltaire Marcelin’s work has been included in diverse anthologies published in France, Canada, and the United States, including Terre de Femmes (2010), a special issue on Haiti for Cahiers de la Revue d’Art, Littérature, Musique (2009), Revue Intranqu’îllités (Vols. 1 and 2, 2011–2013), Anthologie Secrète de Magloire Saint-Aude (2012), and Haïti Noir 2, the Classics (2014).
Voltaire Marcelin has read and performed her poetry at numerous national and international venues, including the Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA), La MaMa Experimental theatre Club, Cornelia Street Café, New Morning jazz club in Paris, Lion d’Or Cabaret in Montreal, the United Nations, and international book fairs in Miami and Costa Rica. She has also presented her work in academic venues, such as Vassar College, the Segal theater at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and UCLA’s Fowler Museum, during the Haiti Stories/ Istwa Ayiti conference.
As a visual artist, Voltaire Marcelin has exhibited her works at the Art Museum of the Americas (overseen by the Organization of American States, OAS) in Washington, D.C.; Cork Gallery in Lincoln Center and Broome Street Gallery in New York City; the African-American Museum in Hemp-stead, Long Island; and the Museum of National Patrimony in Haiti.
[See also Danticat, Edwidge; Duvalier, François; Duvalier, Jean-Claude; Peck, Raoul; and Schwarz-Bart, Simone.]
Bibliography
Michèle Voltaire Marcelin (Website). http://www.lidous.net.
Trouillot, Lyonel. “L’univers domestique haïtien : Souvenirs de la cruauté ; Critique littéraire de ‘La Désenchantée.’ ” Le Matin, no. 32701, 15 January 2007.
Voltaire Marcelin, Michèle. Amores y cosas sin importancia. Havana, Cuba: Editorial ALBA, 2009.
Voltaire Marcelin, Michèle. Amours et Bagatelles. Montreal: Éditions du CIDIHCA, 2009.
Voltaire Marcelin, Michèle. La Désenchantée. Montreal: Éditions du CIDIHCA, 2006.
Voltaire Marcelin, Michèle. Lost and Found. Montreal: Éditions du CIDIHCA, 2009.
Voltaire Marcelin, Michèle. “True Life.” In Haïti Noir 2, The Classics, Part 2: Seduced, edited by Edwidge Danticat, pp. 176–186. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Akashic, 2014. Originally published 2008.
- Sophie Maríñez
[The photo above is from Rezo Nòdwès.]
We were stunned to hear that Haitian writer, visual artist, and performer Michèle Voltaire Marcelin passed away on April 29, 2026. May she rest in peace. Jocelyn McCalla has requested that people use a biography by Sophie Mariñez, published in the Oxford Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography in 2016 (and therefore, missing the
