Local woman publishes book of poetry

Margareth Debrosse put her pen to paper in January 2011, one year after an earthquake devastated her home country of Haiti. It was the first time she had written a poem in decades.

She kept writing. Now, after more than three years of writing and posting her poems online, she has published the first volume of five. The Valley Stream nurse and mother of three debuted “In the Deep Blue Ocean” earlier this month.

"This is the first of five books that I've written and finished," she said. "As long as this has some success, we plan on beginning to publish the other four. Once I started writing, I just opened up and kept going and going, and I ended up writing enough for five books."

Once she started in 2011, she said, she knew that she had more to say.

“The words just kept flowing out of me. I was inspired by everything — books I’ve read, music I’ve heard, people I know, even the clothes I see people in,” she said. “I shared [the poems] with friends and family, and eventually started publishing them online. People really seemed to like them, and I kept writing, and it’s just worked out so well.”

Debrosse won a number of awards, including several from PoetryNation, an online community that provides a platform for amateur poets to share their work and awards cash prizes for outstanding work. Her poems attracted the attention of publishers, and she signed a deal with Tate Publishing to produce her first volume in 2014.

Debrosse insists that she did not do it alone. She was born in Haiti in 1960. She immigrated to Long Island at the age of 13, six years after her father moved to the United States. She was the seventh of 13 children, and said that while such a large family presented its share of challenges, it was a blessing. She had enough siblings to start a family band, which served as her first foray into creative writing.

"I started writing poems as a teenager,” she said. “I wrote all the lyrics and sang all the songs. I wrote poems all through my teenage years, but stopped as I grew older. That day [in 2011] I sat down and wrote 'An Ode to Haiti' as a remembrance of my home."

Debrosse said that in her poetry, like in her life, the support of her family has been crucial. They provided constant support and made the transition to a new home much easier.