Barry U Alumna Fabienne Josaphat Returns to Campus to Share New Novel

Fabienne Josaphat wrote her first short story in a class with English Professor Andrea Greenbaum. At Dr. Greenbaum’s invitation, the 2003 Barry U grad returned to campus on Thursday, November 13, 2025, to share her second novel, Kingdom of No Tomorrow. “I was once one of you,” she told the students in the English Major, the Honors Program, and the Africana Studies Minor who crowded into Library 308 to learn about Ms. Josaphat’s commitment to historical fiction.

Her first novel, Dancing in the Baron’s Shadow (2016) is set in the 1960s and 1970s in Haiti, where Ms. Josaphat was born. “Haiti is so misunderstood,” she observed. “There’s what the media tells you about Haiti, then there is the Haiti I know.”

For Kingdom of Tomorrow, the author ventured beyond what she knew to write about the Black Panther movement in the United States. She recounted how she interviewed now elderly Black Panthers to make sure she depicted the Panthers’ struggle accurately.

Although those struggles are in the past, Ms. Josaphat believes that the Black Panthers continue to serve as a model for community organizing today. Through historical fiction, she finds hope for the future in the past. 

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