Danielle Legros Georges

We are saddened to inform you that Danielle Legros Georges passed away peacefully on February 11 at her home in Dorchester Massachusetts. Her partner Tom Laughlin and her brothers Gerard, Bernard, and Stephan were with her.

 Danielle, a poet, translator, editor, author, and academic, was born on February 14, 1964, in Gonaïves, Haiti, to parents Rodney Georges, an engineer, and Edmonde Legros Georges, a secondary school teacher. 

 The family lived in the Democratic Republic of Congo before settling in the Mattapan neighborhood of Boston. She attended St. Angela’s School and then St. Claire’s High School where she excelled in academics and track and field. Her love of Afro-Haitian dance led her to attended the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts.

 She earned an undergraduate degree from Emerson College before joining the Dark Room Collective, a group of black artists and writers in the Boston-Cambridge area. She later went on to earn a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Poetry from New York University. In 2016, was awarded an honorary degree of doctor of humane letters by Emerson College.

 Danielle Legros Georges was a professor and Director of the MFA in Creative Writing program at Lesley University, retiring in 2023 as a professor emerita in the MFA in Creative Writing program. 

 She was chosen as the City of Boston’s second Poet Laureate in 2015, serving in the role until 2019. In 2024, she was inducted into the American Antiquarian Society and named a Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France’s Ministry of Culture. 

Danielle was the author of several collections of poetry, including Three Leaves, Three Roots: Poems on the Haiti–Congo Story (Beacon Press, 2025); The Dear Remote Nearness of You (Barrow Street Press, 2016), winner of the New England Poetry Club’s 2016 Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize; and Maroon (Curbstone Books, 2001).

 Danielle was co-editor, with Artress Bethany White, of Wheatley at 250: Black Women Poets Re-imagine the Verse of Phillis Wheatley Peters (Pangyrus, 2023), and editor of City of Notions: An Anthology of Contemporary Boston Poems (Boston Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture, 2017). She was the translator of the anthology Blue Flare: Three Haitian Poets: Évelyne Trouillot, Marie-Célie Agnant, Maggy de Coster (Zephyr Press, 2024) and of Island Heart: The Poems of Ida Faubert (Subpress Collective, 2021).

 Danielle received many honors and awards included fellowships and grants from organizations such as the American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, the Boston Foundation, the PEN/Heim Translation Fund, and the Black Metropolis Research Consortium. 

Her writer’s website, https://www.daniellelegrosgeorges.com/, provides links to her books and selected poems.

 Donations may be made in her name to the Mass General Cancer Center, 55 Fruit Street, Boston MA 02114.

“I do believe that a poem should move the

reader or listener. In order for it to do this, it must

in its conception and / or construction move its

maker somehow–it must shift something in its

maker. This connects to the poem as space of

inquiry for me.” – Danielle Legros Georges

Danielle's Celebration of Life and Legacy will be live-streamed --- Meeting ID: 547 791 1838 ~~~ Passcode: thepoet