Haiti Will Not Perish – Author Event with Michael Deibert
Date and Time
Aug 6, 2017 7:00 pm
Location
450K
450 K St NW, Washington, District of Columbia, 20001
Aug 6, 2017 7:00 pm
450K
Please join Busboys and Poets Books as we welcome author Michael Deibert to our 5th and K location to discuss his new book Haiti Will Not Perish: A Recent History.
The world’s first independent black republic, Haiti was forged in the fire of history’s only successful slave revolution. Yet more than two hundred years later, the full promise of the revolution—a free country and a free people—remains unfulfilled. Home for more than a decade to one of the world’s largest UN peacekeeping forces, Haiti has a tumultuous political culture—buffeted by coups and armed political partisans—that combined with economic inequality and environmental degradation, created immense difficulties even before a devastating earthquake leveled the capital of Port-au-Prince in 2010, killing tens of thousands of people.
This grim tale, however, is not the whole story. In this moving and detailed history, Michael Deibert, who has spent two decades reporting on Haiti, chronicles the heroic struggles of Haitians to build their longed-for country in the face of overwhelming odds. Based on years of interviews with Haitian political leaders, international diplomats, peasant advocates, gang leaders, and hundreds of ordinary Haitians, Deibert’s book provides a vivid, complex, and challenging analysis of Haiti’s recent history.
We are excited to welcome Deibert to 5th and K. Deibert first began visiting Haiti in 1997, and his writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Miami Herald, Le Monde diplomatique, Folha de Sao Paulo and the World Policy Journal, among other venues. He has been a featured commentator on international affairs on the BBC, Al Jazeera, Channel 4, France 24, National Public Radio, WNYC New York Public Radio and KPFK Pacifica Radio. In 2012, he was awarded a grant from the International Peace Research Association and, in 2008, he was selected as a ?nalist for the Kurt Schork Award in International Journalism, sponsored by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, both in recognition of his work in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
