Havana and Haiti: Reshaping the New Americas and the World

Ana Menéndez is the author of four books of fiction, In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, which was a 2001 New York Times Notable book of the year and whose title story won a Pushcart Prize, Loving Che, The Last War, chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of the top 100 books of the year, and Adios, Happy Homeland! Since 1991 Ana has worked as a journalist in the United States and abroad, most recently as a prize-winning columnist for the Miami Herald. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications including Vogue,Bomb Magazine, Poets & Writers and Gourmet Magazine and has been included in several anthologies, including Cubanisimo! and American Food Writing.

André Chung is an award-winning photojournalist and portrait photographer, specializing in capturing moments, conveying emotion and communicating messages with images. Using bold composition and emotional content to connect with individuals and tell stories that matter, his empathetic, documentary-style photography and dramatic portraiture has been honed over a twenty-year-career in newspapers and magazines. He has created images for a range of clients, including the Washington Post magazine, NBC News, Ebony magazine, the NAACP and the Annie E. Casey Foundation. He also was one of a select group of photojournalists chosen in 2009 and 2013 to work on the Official Inaugural Book for President Barack Obama. He was a staff photographer for over twelve years at the Baltimore Sun, and was previously on staff at the Chicago Sun-Times. As a founding member of the Iris PhotoCollective, his work has always explored people of color and their relationships to each other and the world.

Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Carl Philippe Juste has received numerous awards for his work from Pictures of the Year, Society for News Design, Best of Photojournalism and the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. Juste was a photojournalist with Miami Herald for twenty years Juste is also a founder of the IPC Visual Lab, where he teaches, and the Iris Photo Collective, which is dedicated to exploring and documenting the relationship of people of color to the world.

Carol Guzy started off studying to be a nurse.  It was a gift of a camera from a friend that led her to a career as one of the top photojournalists in the world. Her fascination with photography led to an internship and then a job at the Miami Herald. In 1988 she moved to the Washington Post. Over the years, Guzy has won four Pulitzer Prizes—the only journalist to do so, and only one of four people to have ever done so—was the first woman to receive the Newspaper Photographer of the Year Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and three Photographer of the Year awards in the National Press Photographers' annual contest.

Edwidge Danticat was born in Haiti and came to the United States when she was twelve years old. Her books include Breath, Eyes, Memory; the short-story collection Krik? Krak!; and The Farming of Bones. Named one of the 20 Best of American Novelists by Granta, Danticat’s awards include a Pushcart Prize for short fiction an American Book Award. Her books have been selected for Oprah’s Book Club and have been twice nominated for the National Book Award. In 2009 Danticat received a MacArthur Genius Grant. Edwidge Danticat’s illustrated children’s book, Mama’s Nightingale: A Story of Immigration and Separation (Dial Books), shows how every child has the power to make a difference. Edwidge Danticat fèt an Ayiti, men li imigre Ozetazini depi a laj douzan. Edwidge te resevwa yon diplòm an literati fransèz nan Barnard College, e apre sa li te fè yon metriz nan Brown University. Li se otè plizyè liv, tankou paregzanp Souf, Je, Memwa ; Krik? Krak! (ki te pami finalis « National Book Award » -- ki fè Edwidge se pi jèn moun yo janm nonmen pou pri sa a); La récolte douce des larmes; avèk Le briseur de rosée, ki te resevwa yon « American Book Award ». Edwidge ekri plizyè liv pou timoun ak jèn moun, tankou paregzanp Pour l ‘amour de Claire, avèk Anakawona, Flè Annò. Se li ki edite Haïti Noir; The Butterfly's Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States avèk The Beacon Best of 2000: Great Writing by Men and Women of All Colors and Cultures. Lòt onè Danticat resevwa gen ladan « National Book Critics Circle Award » pou yon resi ki rele Adieu, mon frère. Li resevwa yon « MacArthur Fellowship », e li te anseye ekriti nan University of Miami ak New York University.

Award-winning journalist John Yearwood is World Editor of the Miami Herald and a Vice Chair of the Vienna-based International Press Institute, the world's oldest press-freedom organization. At the Herald, he directs the paper's national and international coverage. Under his leadership, the World Desk has won numerous awards, including the Arthur Ross Award for best coverage of Latin America. Yearwood’s leadership of the newspaper’s Haiti earthquake coverage contributed to the Herald being named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News. Yearwood is a regular guest on National Public Radio, and local and national television programs, including the Tavis Smiley Show. During the course of his career, he has met with countless world leaders ranging from Nelson Mandela and Margaret Thatcher to President Obama and Jordan’s King Abdullah. Yearwood was named one of the 40 most influential African-Americans under 40 in South Florida and one of the 100 most successful Caribbean-Americans in South Florida. He is a recipient of a Miami-Dade County Pillar Award and the Haitian Women of Miami Leadership Award.

Leonard Pitts, Jr. is a nationally syndicated columnist for the Miami Herald and winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. He is the author of the novels Freeman, and Before I Forget; the collection Forward From this Moment: Selected Columns, 1994-2009, Daily Triumphs, Tragedies, and Curiosities; and Becoming Dad: Black Men and the Journey to Fatherhood. Pitts’s new novel, Grant Park (Agate Bolden; $24.95), begins in 1968, with Martin Luther King's final days in Memphis. The story then moves to the eve of the 2008 election, and cuts between the two eras. Disillusioned columnist Malcolm Toussaint hacks into his newspaper's server to post an incendiary column that had been rejected by his editors. Toussaint then disappears, and his longtime editor, Bob Carson, is summarily fired within hours of the column's publication. While a furious Carson tries to find him, Toussaint is abducted by two white supremacists plotting to explode a bomb at Barack Obama's planned rally in Chicago’s Grant Park. Toussaint and Carson are forced to remember the choices they made as young men, when both their lives were changed profoundly by their work in the civil rights movement.

During the last several decades, critically acclaimed photographer Les Stone has chronicled the human cost of conflict in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Kosovo, Liberia, Cambodia and Haiti, among other war zones. The winner of several World Press Photo Awards and Picture of the Year Awards, Stone vaulted to prominence in 1989 when he photographed the savage, bloody beating of the newly elected Vice President of Panama by thugs of Generalissimo Manuel Noriega. Since then, Stone has covered stories often ignored by the mainstream media, including the deadly legacy of Agent Orange in Vietnam, the plight of Iraqi Kurds fleeing the first Gulf War, and the deployment of child-soldiers in Africa. His work has appeared in National Geographic, on the cover of Time, Life, Paris Match, Fortune, the New York Times, the Smithsonian magazine, Newsweek, Mother Jones, and US News and World Report, among other places.

Luis Rios is a national award-winning editor whose work has been awarded two Pulitzer Prizes, a RFK Photojournalism Award, two Scripps Howard Photojournalism Awards and several National Headliners and World Press photography awards. While at the Miami Herald from 2003 through 2009, he directed and edited the coverage for the Herald’s 2009 Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News Photography. As Night Picture Editor at the Washington Post, he edited a trio of photographers who won the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Photography in 2000. Currently, he is the San Antonio Express News Director of Photography.  In 2014, a trio of San Antonio Express photographers he directed, on a photo essay about the border surge of Central American women and children into Texas, were named Finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Photography.