Monique Clesca

Monique Clesca is a Haitian writer, journalist and advocate who has led two fulfilling careers. As an activist, she worked in international development advocating for children's and women's rights and on high-level policy linked to Haiti and Africa; since retiring from full-time work at the United Nations in 2016 she has worked as an international consultant. A leading feminist pro-democracy and pro-social-justice voice in Haiti, she has spoken at the Yale Law School Human Rights Clinic and the Parliament of Canada, and appeared on Democracy Now, NPR, CNN, MSNBC, NBC News and Black News. In 2016 the President of Niger named her a Commander in the Niger National Order of Merit for spearheading a country-wide movement to end child marriage, and she has received several Royal Honorific Titles from Niger's Traditional Chiefs. Her second life is writing: she is the author of two self-published books in French, the novel La Confession and the essay collection Mosaiques, and has just completed her memoir Silence and Resistance: Memoir of a Girlhood in Haiti, excerpted by Narrative Magazine and Black Renaissance Noire. Her nonfiction — largely on Haiti, displacement, family, gender and identity — has appeared in the New York Times, Narrative Magazine, the Miami Herald, Foreign Affairs, Americas Quarterly, Foreign Policy, Just Security, Le Nouvelliste and Black Renaissance Noire, among others. She holds a master's degree in journalism from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism and a B.A. in Philosophy from Howard University. A national of Haiti, she lives in Haiti and Miami.