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Jacques Stanley Fleury is a Haitian American Poet, Educator and Author of four books. He has a degree in Liberal Arts and is pursuing graduate studies in the fine arts through Harvard University. His first book Sparks in the Dark: A Lighter Shade of Blue, A Poetic Memoir about life in Haiti and America was endorsed by the Boston Globe. Fleury is prominently featured in newspapers, anthologies and prestigious libraries and literary publications worldwide such as Muddy River Poetry Review and Cornell University Press’s anthology Class Lives: Stories from Our Economic Divide. Two of his books, Sparks in the Dark and his epochal tome Chain Letter To America: The One Thing You Can Do To End Racism, are permanently archived at the University of Massachusetts Healey Library. Find his books locally at The Grolier Poetry Bookshop, Porter Square Books, The Harvard Book Store, and worldwide online. He lives in Cambridge, MA.

Who Am I?

if you peel layer upon layer upon layer maybe then and

only then will you find me…

for i am a multilayered entity…

a building block of heterogeneity

i can be fierce and unflinching apathetic and also doting

docile and also volatile lovable and also irritable

compulsive and also discernible

i am a man i am a “black” man i am an American i am a “black” American

i am a DNA test from Ancestry dot com’s family tree and twenty-three and me

i am African ancestry i am Afro Haitian ancestry i am European ancestry

i am the legacy of a middle-class family in Haiti i am the legacy of America’s social and economic disparity

I am the story of Horatio Alger’s characters thriving over adversity

i am a malady i am a remedy i am a rainbow i am a shadow i am a son i am a brother

i am an uncle i am an author i am an educator and pervasive human valor coconspirator

i am in attrition i am in progression i am an amalgamation i am perfectly imperfect and imperfect perfectly

i am a thesis of social injustice i am a vision of personal apotheosis

i am all this and more… I Am ME!

— Jacques Stanley Fleury

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