Patrick Sylvain is a Haitian-American educator, poet, writer, social and literary critic, and translator whose work explores Haiti and the Haitian diaspora’s culture, politics, language, and religion. The author of several poetry collections in English and Haitian, Sylvain’s poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appear in leading journals including Ploughshares, Callaloo, Transition, Prairie Schooner, Agni, American Poetry Review, SpoKe, The Caribbean Writer, and African American Review. His short stories are also widely published. He holds degrees from UMass-Boston, Harvard, Boston University, and Brandeis University, where he was the Shirle Dorothy Robbins Creative Writing Prize Fellow. Sylvain recently taught Global, Transnational, and Postcolonial Literature at Simmons University and served on Harvard’s History and Literature Tutorial Board. As of Fall 2026, Sylvain is Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, and Director of the minor in Human Rights at UMass Boston. His publications include Education Across Borders (Beacon Press, 2022) and Underworlds (Central Square Press, 2018). Forthcoming works in 2026 include: Scorched Pearl of the Antilles (Palgrave Macmillan) and poetry collections from Arrowsmith Press (Fire on the Tongue), Central Square Press (Unfinished Dreams / Rèv San Bout).
PRAISE:
Habits of Light is a luminous meditation on memory, ancestry, and the urgency of now. Patrick Sylvain‘s poems radiate with emotional truth, resistance and survival. These poems do not simply reflect light; they transform it. Habits of Light is a living archive, a lyrical reckoning, and a graceful call to remember.
–Edwidge Danticat, author of We’re Alone
What a fine read! Over the years, poetry gifted Patrick Sylvain the ability to see beyond mere sense impressions to areas of investigation and sound. No empty jabbering here or unintelligible fragments. So many poems in this collection edge language in revelatory ways that make my mind dance; the source of his understanding, that which brings him to the page, is a foundational and patient and celebratory love where “light is a blues-doctor” that flourishes around us, that which should be named and cast to those we hold dear. Enjoy these poems as a shared gift by this very talented poet.
–Major Jackson, Author of Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems
“Alas, the long anticipated full length volume by Patrick Sylvain. These poems uniquely howl, moan and sing measured ballads of one of Boston’s most global citizens and poets. These are poems of diaspora, of death, of coming of age, of war and conflict, of justice and injustice all without didact but with the broadest love. After reading these poems one is left with a sea of clarity, ‘that has never known surrender.”
–Kevin Gallagher, Professor, essayist, poet—Boston University
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