Many on the Eastern Mennonite University campus are anticipating the Sept. 17-18 visit of Chilean-American writer Majorie Agosín. A professor of Latin American studies and Spanish language at Wellesley College, Agosín will share poetry, art, conversation and personal history with the campus community and with select groups of faculty and students, including graduate students from Eastern Mennonite Seminary and the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. Her visit is eagerly anticipated from across the disciplines.
From Adriana Rojas, assistant professor of language and literature who teaches Spanish language, literature and film: “Marjorie Agosín’s academic writing, memoir, and fiction draw attention to injustices in our world. These corpuses of scholarly work and lived experience reach across many disciplines and are in harmony with EMU’s values of peacebuilding. She alerts us to the way we are incorporated in another’s trauma or receivers of untold and disturbing narratives, yet there is a resounding sense of hope. Her work informs, and more significantly, broadens our empathy for our fellow and suffering human beings.”
From Trina Trotter Nussbaum, associate director of EMU’s Center for Interfaith Engagement: “Her experience as a Jewish Latin American woman is one of being ‘in between’ and ‘on a quest of belonging,’ both themes that resonate in my work and my personal life. The themes of her creative work are often memory and narrative – her family’s experience of the Holocaust, and of oppression in Chile and elsewhere in Latin America, expressed through poetry and the fabric arts.”
From Michael Medley, department chair of the language and literature department: “Marjorie Agosín came back from Chile to the land of her birth as an older teenager, finishing high school and doing her university work here. This is a very difficult challenge to face any young person who is uprooted from home and close friends. Her writing in many ways embodies the resilience that she developed through that difficult transition in her life. She loves her native language and has maintained a commitment to write in that language, letting others be the translators of her work into English.”
From Nancy Heisey, professor of Bible and religion and director of EMU’s Core Curriculum: “Hearing a poet read her own work offers a window into a broader world. I’m thrilled that all first-year students get this opportunity.”
On Campus
Three events are open to the public. On Thursday evening from 8-9:30 p.m. in Lehman Auditorium, Agosín gives a poetry reading.
On Friday, she will help to inaugurate Latino Heritage Month with the Latino Students Association at a 10 a.m. chapel in Lehman Auditorium.
She will also attend a 4-5 p.m. reception with the public, hosted by the student association, at Common Grounds Coffeehouse.
Additionally, a collection of of arpilleras will be displayed at the Margaret Gehman Gallery. The small quilted squares were created by groups of women, called arpilleristas, who were protesting the horrific brutality of General Augosto Pinochet’s regime during the 1970s and 1980s.
While on campus, Agosín will also visit a Hispanic Civilization class and host a Spanish-language luncheon with Tertulia, the conversation club. She’ll also speak about transgenerational trauma in an hour-long event for seminary and CJP graduate students that is also open to the campus community and sponsored by both the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding and the Center for Interfaith Engagement.
About Marjorie Agosín
Agosín has published more than 80 books, including two recent books of poetry: The Light of Desire / La Luz del Deseo, translated by Lori Marie Carlson (Swan Isle Press, 2009), and Secrets in the Sand: The Young Women of Juárez, translated by Celeste Kostopulos-Cooperman (White Pine Press, 2006), which addresses the long history of unsolved murders of young maquiladoras in a large Mexican city across the border from El Paso, Texas.
Born in Maryland, she moved with her Jewish parents in 1955 back to their Chilean homeland at the age of three months. She was raised in a German community until her family fled to the United States during the overthrow of Salvadore Allende’s government by the U.S.-backed military forces of General Augusto Pinochet.
She is the recipient of many awards, including the Dr. Fritz Redlich Global Mental Health and Human Rights Award (2013); the Good Neighbor Award (1988); the National Mujer Award (2004); the Letras de Oro Prize (1995); and the Latino Literature Prize (1995).