Synopses & Reviews
Over the past decade over 350 women around the city of Juárez, Mexico, have been raped and murdered. The remains of these brutalized young women continue to be found scattered in the parched desert, vacant city lots, and roadside ditches. Others are never found.
In Secrets In The Sand, Agosin through her words and images invites her readers to bear witness to the reality that the grieving families of the disappeared and murdered young women face every day.
As a poet and human rights activist Marjorie Agosin has dedicated her life’s work to the search for justice and human dignity.
Synopsis
Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Translated from the Spanish by Celeste Kostopulos-Cooperman, Marjore Agosin's SECRETS IN THE SAND: THE YOUNG WOMEN OF JUAREZ is the work of a poet who has dedicated her life to the search for justice and human dignity. In poems of stark accountability, Agosin invites her readers to bear witness to the atrocities over 350 women around the city of Juarez suffered over the past decade, as well as the grief that the families of the disappeared and murdered young women face every day.
Synopsis
"Night in Juarez was a perverse mirror/Where death breathed its hollow/Trophies over the sand."
About the Author
Marjorie Agosn, human rights activist, writer, and scholar, was born in Bethesda, MD, in 1955, but her family returned to Chile when she was only three months old. A descendant of Russian and Austrian Jews who fled pogroms and the Holocaust, she grew up in Santiago de Chile, where she attended the Instituto Hebreo (Jewish school) until she was fourteen. Then, the Pinochet dictatorship forced her family into exile. In 1971, they moved to the U.S., where Agosn completed her education. She is currently a professor of Latin American Studies at Wellesley College, MA. Agosn has won several awards for her human rights work, including the Good Neighbor Award given by the Conference of Christians and Jews and the Jeanette Rankin Award in 1995. She received also in 1995 two prestigious literary prizes: the Letras de Oro prize for poetry, and the Latino Literature Prize for her poetry collection Toward the Splendid City (1994). Agosn is one of the most prolific Latin American women writers living in the US. She has published over 20 books of poetry, four books that could be defined as either autobiographical fiction or memoirs, three collections of short fiction, and 10 books that include scholarly work and personal essays devoted to women and human rights. She is also the editor of 18 anthologies of literary works, literary criticism, and autobiographical writings. Her poetry, fiction, and most of her essays are published in Spanish. Her early poetry collections were first published in Latin America, but her latest poems have been first published in the U.S. in bilingual editions. Her autobiographical writings focus on her family background and her personal experience of displacement as a Jewish Chilean woman in the U.S. She defines herself as Latin American, rather than Latina, and considers herself primarily a poet. Cultural translation is an essential aspect of her works as a committed writer, educator, and scholar. As an editor, she is mainly interested in giving visibility to Latin American literature and culture, and especially women's contributions in literature and in the arts.