Marjorie Agosín
Marjorie Agosín
Marjorie Agosín is a Chilean American poet who writes in Spanish, her native language. She is also a human rights activist and the Andrew Mellon professor of the Humanities at Wellesley College. Her work has been inspired by the causes of social justice and human rights. In addition to her numerous collections of poetry, Agosín has written young-adult novels, memoirs, and anthologies promoting international women writers. Among her many distinctions, she has been honored by the American Library Association with the Pura Belpre Award for her novel I Lived on Butterfly Hill. She has also received the Gabriela Mistral Medal, the Chilean government’s Medal of Honor for Lifetime Achievement, a Fulbright fellowship, the Jasper Whiting award for travel, and the United Nations Leadership Award for Human Rights.
Beyond the Time of Words/Más allá del tiempo de las palabras
Composed during the time of isolation wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, Marjorie Agosín’s bilingual book of poetry, Beyond the Time of Words/Más allá del tiempo de las palabras embraces that darkness with profound compassion and humanity. Born in Chile, Agosín came to the United States as a political exile, and her prolific career has been inspired by both political activism and the pursuit of social justice. While bearing witness to our collective grief, these poems also offer reminders of bravery and ultimately hope: They are meant, the poet says, “to cleanse and mend the world.”
Celeste Kostopulos-Cooperman is a professor emerita of Spanish and Latin American Studies at Suffolk University in Boston. Her translations of Latin American women’s poetry have appeared in numerous publications, including Agni, Harper’s, The Michigan Quarterly Review, and The Massachusetts Review. She has translated six books of poems by Marjorie Agosín, including At the Threshold of Memory: Selected and New Poems; Secrets in the Sand: The Young Women of Juárez; and Circles of Madness/Círculos de locura: Las madres de la Plaza de Mayo, for which she received the American Literary Translation Award.