We are mourning the death of Dr. Florence Bellande Robertson
We are mourning the death of Dr. Florence Bellande Robertson, our 2007 President and Founders Circle Member. Dr. Bellande Robertson was a beloved member of our community, a professor of language and literature and the author of several books on Haitian literature. We will miss her greatly. She was a kind, loving, and passionate supporter of the arts and humanities in Haiti and in her adopted communities of Los Angeles and Boca Raton. We present our sympathies to her HAS friends and colleagues and particularly to her family, her husband Jon and her daughters Nadège, Bérangère, and Sabine.
Florence Bellande Robertson holds a doctorate in francophone literature from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and taught language and literature at La Sierra University and the University of Redlands. In 1966, as a social activist, she joined the feminist branch of JEUNE HAITI, a resistance movement in the Diaspora. In 1995, she founded La Fondation Espoir (Haiti) with a branch in Florida, Foundation Hope for Haiti (2002), which she continues to direct. She is also a founding member of KOSANBA and of Multicultural Women’s Presence (MWP) and was president of the Haitian Studies Association (HSA) in 2007. She has published several articles, books of poetry, and a volume of literary analysis (The Marassa Concept in Lilas Desquiron’s Reflexions of Loko Miwa [1999]), and is coeditor of Brassage: An Anthology of Poems by Haitian Women (2005).