TatiLoutard was born in the Congo in 1938. He studied in Brazzaville, earning his degree a few years later at the University of Bordeaux. In 1966 he returned to Brazzaville to teach at the Centre dEnseignement Superieur. With his rise in stature, he became a leader of the Congolese cultural movement, climaxing to a position of Minister of Culture and Arts in the late 1980s. TatiLoutard made his mark on Francophone poetry as a leader of the generation that followed Leopold Senghor and David Diop. Where Senghor and Diop sought to use their voice to break away from the confining rhyming verse of the earlier works of Birago Diop and JeanJoseph Rabearivelo in favor of a free rhetorical verse, TatiLoutard has worked to develop the stature of Francophone African poetry through a return to more classical styles of unrhyming meter. As a student of Aimé Césars Negritude, TatiLoutard seeks a black voice to answer the challenges of the human condition.

Website: http://web.uflib.ufl.edu/cm/africana/tati.htm