Biography of Myriam J.A. Chancy

Myriam J. A. Chancy is a Haitian-Canadian-American writer and academic. Chancy was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 1970. She lived there for the first few years of her life before immigrating to Canada with her family. Her family would often come back to visit Port-au-Prince and Chancy remembers the joy and beauty of those trips: the table full of traditional foods, talking with people in the markets, and the generosity of the people.

Chancy received her Ph.D. at the University of Iowa at the age of 24 with a dissertation about Afro-Caribbean women writers in exile. She was awarded early tenure at age 27 for her contributions to Caribbean Studies. Chancy’s academic specialization is in Caribbean women's literature; she published Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women, the first book to argue that there is a “coherent tradition of Haitian women’s literature.” Myriam J. A. Chancy is a Guggenheim Fellow and currently the HBA Chair of the Humanities at Scripps College.

Chancy has written multiple academic books as well as four novels. Her first novel, Spirit of Haiti, was published in 2003 and was shortlisted for Best First Book in the Canada/Caribbean region category of the Commonwealth Prize in 2004. Published in 2010, Chancy’s third novel, The Loneliness of Angels, was awarded the 2011 Guyana Prize in Caribbean Literature for Best Fiction. What Storm, What Thunder is her fourth novel. All her novels have won critical praise and are currently being taught at universities across the Caribbean, U.S., and Canada.

Apart from writing, Chancy is a guest speaker who frequently delivers talks and creative readings on subjects relating to the Caribbean, Haiti, and social justice. She has also served on several editorial boards for academic journals, such as the Journal of Haitian Studies from 2000-2015.