Danielle Legros Georges

Danielle Legros Georges was born in Gonaïves, Haiti, and raised in Boston. She earned an undergraduate degree from Emerson College before joining the Dark Room Collective. She later received an MFA in poetry from New York University.

Legros Georges is 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).

Legros Georges is the coeditor, 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 is 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).

Legros Georges’s honors and awards include fellowships and grants from various organizations, including 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. In 2016, she was awarded an honorary degree of doctor of humane letters by Emerson College, and 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.

In 2015, Legros Georges was named Boston’s second poet laureate, serving in the role until 2019. She is a professor emerita in the MFA creative writing program at Lesley University and lives in Boston.