Award-winning Cuban Poet, Translator Shares Memories of Communist State at Poetry Center

GOLDEN GATE XPRESS -- More than 50 years after her young introduction to the first communist state in the Western Hemisphere, the Women and Gender Studies Department and the Poetry Center on campus are kicking off the fall semester with a reading by Morejón, now a poet and translator. The reading on Thursday, September 4, celebrates the works of Morejón, who grew up in Havana, Cuba, to a militant dockworker and a trade unionist seamstress during the rise of Fidel Castro in the 1950s. In the preface for her new book “Homing Instincts/ Querencias,” Morejón discusses how growing up in the middle of that revolutionary time shaped her poetry. “It affected (me) deeply,” Morejón said, “being the only child of parents so firmly rooted in the trade union movement and in the life of a port city where black and white intermingled in the neighborhoods, united by their common bond of hard work.”