Patti M. Marxsen
Jacques Roumain by Patti M. Marxsen

Patti M. Marxsen

Patti M. Marxsen is a writer, translator, and independent scholar whose works have been published in the United States and Europe. In the early years of her writing life, she covered visual art for newspapers in Kentucky (Lexington Herald-Leader) and Maine (The Camden Herald). After moving to Switzerland in 2007, she contributed a monthly column on Swiss art museums for the magazine of the American Women’s Club of Zurich (2007-2009). She is, however, best known as an essayist, biographer, and for her writings on Haitian literature that have been published in the French Review, the Caribbean Writer, the Women’s Review of Books, Asymptote, The Critical Flame, and The Journal of Haitian Studies, among others.

During her seven years as publications manager at the Boston Research Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts—now “Ikeda Center for Peace, Learning, and Dialogue”—Marxsen developed multi-author books on global ethics and education for the college market. Her own books include collections of travel essays and short fiction as well as two critical biographies: Helene Schweitzer: A Life of Her Own (Syracuse University Press, 2015) and Jacques Roumain: A Life of Resistance (Caribbean Studies Press, 2019), which was honoured with the 2019 Haitian Studies Association Book Prize.

Her book-length translations from the French include Albert Schweitzer’s Lambarene: A Legacy of Humanity for Our World Today by Jo and Walter Munz (2010) and two works by Swiss writer C.F. Ramuz (1878–1947): Riversong of the Rhone, a bilingual edition of his Chant de notre Rhône (1920/2015), and Passage of the Poet (1923/2020). In 2017, she served as editor-in-chief of Offshoots–Writing from Geneva, the biennial literary journal of the Geneva Writers’ Group.

Pictured on this page is the cover of her biography of the iconic Haitian writer, ethnologist, and public intellectual Jacques Roumain (1907–1944). Roumain is best known for his opposition to the American Occupation of Haiti (1915–1931) and for Gouverneurs de la rosée, his posthumous novel translated by Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes as Masters of the Dew (1947). As with her previous work, this project involved extensive travel in the Francophone world, archival research, and the consumption of French food and wine.