René Depestre

René Depestre (born 29 August 1926) is a Haitian poet and communist. He lived in Cuba as an exile from the Duvalier regime for many years and was a founder of the Casa de las Americas publishing house. He is best known for his poetry. The city of Jacmel, his birthplace, is often evoked in his poetry and his novels, in particular Hadriana In All My Dreams (1988). He did his primary studies with the Breton Brothers of Christian Instruction. His father died in 1936 and Rene Depestre left his mother, his two brothers and his two sisters to go live with his maternal grandmother. From 1940 to 1944, he completed his secondary studies at the Pétion college in Port-au-Prince. Étincelles (Sparks), his first collection of poetry, appeared in 1945, prefaced by Edris Saint-Amand. He was only nineteen years old when the work was published. The poems were influenced by the marvelous realism of Alejo Carpentier, who planned a conference on this subject in Haiti in 1942. Depestre created a weekly...

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