You Should Be Called Beacon: Remembering Danielle Legros Georges

Essays in the “Remembrances” series pay tribute to poets who have died in the past year.

I last spoke to Danielle Legros Georges at the Goethe-Institut in Boston in October 2024, during the Boston Book Festival. Danielle had just interviewed former Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate Marie-Célie Agnant about Blue Flare: Three Haitian Poets (Zephyr Press, 2024)—edited by Danielle and with work by Agnant, among others—an event that drew a large audience. We moved through the crowd toward each other and hugged, and I asked Danielle if she’d like to work with me on another translation event for the upcoming Massachusetts Poetry Festival. We’d had a fantastic experience together there just a year earlier on a panel with Ukrainian American translator and poet Dzvinia Orlowsky. “Can—and, should—anyone translate poetry?” we’d quizzed each other. So, I wasn’t surprised when Danielle said, “Of course!” and then reached out and tapped the shoulders of two other translators who were nearby in the crush to make some introductions. The four of us drafted a panel description for “Why and How to Read Poetry in Translation” right there. “Serendipity!” she said with a smile.

Danielle knew then that she was dying. She’d been living with stage 4 breast cancer since 2018. As her partner, the poet Tom Laughlin, later told me, ours was just one of many events, projects, adventures, and ways of serving that she was actively involved in and hoping to realize while still alive. In a January 2025 interview with the Academy of American Poets, Danielle spoke of her appreciation for the poem “On Living” by Nâzim Hikmet: “Even though it’s impossible not to feel sad / about going a little too soon, / we’ll still laugh at the jokes […] // […] we must live as if we will never die.”

Danielle passed in her home in Dorchester on February 11, 2025. Just days earlier, though frail, she went ahead with a prescheduled interview at the WGBH Radio studio. In a weakened voice, she talked about Three Leaves, Three Roots (Beacon Press, 2025), a collection of documentary and epistolary poems based on translated interviews with, and letters from, Haitians who’d moved to Congo—including her parents. “We tend to only focus on questions of slavery,” she said, “but it is my intention to expand the narratives around Haiti.” And so she did, including in an earlier poem called “Poem for the Poorest Country in the Western Hemisphere,” where she writes: “O poorest country, this is not your name. / You should be called beacon. You should // be called flame.”

Three Leaves, Three Roots expands on an earlier chapbook about this transnational narrative, Letters from Congo (2017), published by Central Square Press (helmed by fellow Haitian poet, Enzo Surin). Born in Gonaïves, Haiti, in 1964, Danielle lived in Congo before moving to Boston with her family at age six. In her WGBH interview, she shares: “I was an immigrant child […] deeply interested in language and how language works.” This connection to language is borne out in her work. 

In the early 1990s Danielle participated in the Dark Room Collective, a community of African American writers in Boston. And later, Danielle worked tirelessly to promote Caribbean stories and literature. She was an ICA Arts Advisor and organizer of Caribbean culture-related events at the museum and the creative editor of sx salon, a digital literary platform focused on Caribbean writing. She translated Ida Faubert’s Island Heart, as well as works by Haitian Kreyòl poets such as Félix Morisseau-Leroy. (You can read her fabulous essay about various translations of Morisseau-Leroy’s poem “Mwen menm ou menm” in the important anthology Into English [Graywolf Press, 2017], edited by Martha Collins and Kevin Prufer.)

Danielle organized poetry workshops for veterans at the William Joiner Institute, as well as workshops for seniors and at-risk youth in Boston, and these, combined with her translation work, were all aimed at bringing attention to unheard voices. She once told an interviewer at Boston magazine, “In my ideal world, everybody would have access to the art—to visual art around them, to the possibility of making art.” As a great literary citizen, she was an important mentor to so many up-and-coming writers and translators like me. 

When I was finishing up my collection Object Lesson, which explores sex-trafficking and objectification, I told Danielle I was afraid that audiences would avoid engagement with the poems because of the intensity of the topic. She encouraged me to push through and focus on creating amazing work. She insisted that the best books are built to last. As she put it in her docupoem “My Beloved Companion,”: “I write you these words not knowing whether you will receive them, / when you will receive them, and whether I will still be alive when / you read them.”

Later, when I told Danielle about the difficulties I was encountering while working on my forthcoming anthology Other Paths for Shahrazad (Tupelo Press, 2026), featuring new poetry by women living in Arab nations, she encouraged me to slow down and breathe, and to gather a team. She insisted that there’s always support for unheard voices, and that what I needed to do was ask for help and get to work.

In 2014, Danielle and I were featured readers at the West Falmouth Library on Valentine’s Day, which was also her birthday. We talked about our mutual love of dance and she told me she wanted to organize a crazy rave for stiff poets. Danielle had studied Afro-Haitian dance at the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts and I was an awkward Zumba wannabe—but she welcomed my enthusiasm for her grand idea! Tom told me she still had hopes of holding that dance party in her final months. 

Once, in 2016, over lunch at the Elephant Walk in Cambridge, Danielle gently laughed as she disabused me of all my stupid fears about what was keeping me from moving forward as a translator and teacher. I think I told her I was too poor to have a pet and she teased me and said I’d have to get a few chickens. In my apartment? “Yes!” She had a wicked sense of humor, an awesome laugh, and a deep warmth.

Danielle was the second City of Boston Poet Laureate (2015-2019), and she shone in that role, producing the anthology City of Notions: An Anthology of Contemporary Boston Poems, while also disseminating an incredibly thorough e-newsletter that spotlighted local poets, readings, reviews, words of inspiration, submission opportunities, and poetry-related children’s books. “Poetry can allow us to name and see ourselves in fullness, as individuals, communities, and as a multiracial nation,” wrote Danielle in one of these e-newsletters. Another opens with

a shout-out to the poetry curators and rain gods of the Boston area and beyond: the selectors, the hunters and gatherers, the presenters and re-presenters, interpreters and herders of the wild cat of poetry.

Praised be the literary journal editor, reading series organizer, festival creator, poetry publishing house, zine-maker, heart breaker.

An invitation to deliver a lecture on Phillis Wheatley Peters as part of the society’s Distinguished Lecture Series for the American Antiquarian Society in 2023, inspired Wheatley at 250 (Pangyrus, 2023), co-edited with Artress Bethany White, a collection of responses to, or riffs on, or explorations of 20 Wheatley Peters’s poems by 20 Black women poets. Danielle described the project as an “artistic experiment […] by poets and meant for 21st Century lay readers.” In 2024, she was named a Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France’s Ministry of Culture. She was incredibly grateful for this honor—which isn’t a surprise since she was a gracious person both in public and in private.

It was during Danielle’s tenure as poet laureate that Sam Cornish, the first City of Boston Poet Laureate, died. She held memorial readings for him and honored his legacy and his place among the city’s most renowned literary forebears. Unknowingly, she modeled for those of us now grieving her loss how to respond to her passing. In the months since, there have been numerous readings and events at which Bostonians have gathered to celebrate Danielle’s bright life. 

Martha Collins told me about spending time with Danielle during her final days, the two of them holding hands as Danielle whispered, “Thank you, thank you, thank you…” over and over and over. Martha also told me about the forthcoming, posthumous publication of Danielle’s chapbook Acts of Resistance to New England Slavery by Africans Themselves in New England by Staircase Books, a new press started by James Fraser and Bella Bennett of the famed Grolier Poetry Book Shop. I’m looking forward to reading this work, which sounds like it was meant to be the start of a much bigger project. 

In the meantime, I’m turning to Danielle’s first book, Maroon (Curbstone, 2001). In “Songs for Women” she writes: “Slide ’til the notes are a scaffold, / ash-flicked, unphoenixed.” Reading the virtuosic, musical compression in this ars poetica—and in so many of her pieces—I’m reminded of what Danielle once said about her poetry: “I want everything but the poem to fall away in the moment, to create a vortex, a portal, ultimately a shared if ephemeral journey."

Au revoir pour l’instant, mon amie.