This event is co-sponsored with LACS by the Cornell University and Ithaca College Jewish Studies.
Marjorie Agosin will speak about the complexities of writing about her own family. Mirroring the history of displacement of Jews across the world and especially in Latin America, she will highlight coexistence with SS who found refuge in Jews south of Chile, a small and vulnerable Jewish community in the region. Marjorie will also discuss some writers in LA that have engaged in memoir writing.
Marjorie Agosin is the Andrew Mellon Professor in the Humanities. She is an award-winning poet, memoirist, and Human Rights activist. Her creative work is inspired by the theme of social justice as well as the pursuit of remembrance and the memorialization of traumatic historical events both in the Americas and in Europe. She has written about the Holocaust through the portrayal of Anne Frank as well as the history of Bosnian women during the siege of Sarajevo. Marjorie is also a literary scholar whose work has focused on major writers such as Pablo Neruda, Maria Luisa Bombal, and Gabriela Mistral. She has done extensive research and written about the role of women in Latin America during authoritarian regimes in the seventies and eighties. One of her works, the Arpilleras of Chile, has been a pioneer work on this subject. In her career, Marjorie has written essays, autobiographical memoirs, and a young adult novel with a unified theme of the pursuit of social justice and human rights.
Marjorie is a recipient of the Pura Belpre award, the Gabriela Mistral award for life achievement issued by the Chilean government, and the United Nations Leadership award.
