The East Side Freedom Library invites you to hear a presentation — “Haiti, African Americans, and the U.S.: A Brief History from Revolution to Emigration and Perpetual Reoccupations, 1804-1934” — by Westenley Alcenat, Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University.

Wes was born in Haiti and lived his childhood there.  As a teenager he moved to Minneapolis, where he graduated from public schools and then attended Macalester College. A graduate student in History at Columbia University, he has been a research fellow at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Gilder-Lehrman Institute for American History at Yale, and the Weatherhead Initiative for Global History at Harvard.  Wes is completing his Ph.D. dissertation on the place of Haiti in the lives and imaginations of African Americans, and he will become an Assistant Professor of North American History at Fordham University next year.​

Wes has worked in a number of programs which have supported young people of color to go to college, and he is looking forward to welcoming high school students to his presentation.