Learn about writing memory with authors Marjorie Agosín (author of A Cross & A Star: Memoirs of a Jewish Girl in Chile) and Susan Lynn Meyer (author of Black Radishes and the forthcoming A Sky Full of Song). The event will be translated by Celeste Kostopulos-Cooperman.
This is a free event but Wellesley Books asks that you RSVP with the link below (no fees). If you would rather RSVP over the phone, you can call at 781-431-1160.
The authors’ books will be available for purchase at the event. Please note that if you would like the author to sign your book, it must have been bought from Wellesley Books.
https://www.wellesleybooks.com/event/agosin-and-meyer
Marjorie Agosín was born in Chile in 1955. She began writing poetry as a child, and after her family moved to Athens, Georgia, in 1969, she continued to write poems in Spanish. She received a BA from the University of Georgia and an MA and PhD from Indiana University.
Agosín is the author of numerous poetry collections, including At the Threshold of Memory: New & Selected Poems(White Pine Press, 2003); Toward the Splendid City (Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 1994), winner of the 1995 Latino Literature Prize; and Sargasso (White Pine Press, 1993). Isabel Allende writes, “Agosín’s poetic language engages the reader in a mesmerizing journey of inward reflection and exile.”
Agosín is also the author of several works of prose, including A Cross and a Star: Memoirs of a Jewish Girl in Chile(University of New Mexico Press, 1995) and I Lived on Butterfly Hill (Atheneum Books, 2015), winner of the 2015 International Latino Book Award in young adult fiction.
About the Book:
In this classic memoir that explores the Nazi presence in the south of Chile after the war, Marjorie Agosín writes in the voice of her mother, Frida, who grew up as the daughter of European Jewish immigrants in Chile in the World War II era. Woven into the narrative are the stories of Frida’s father, who had to leave Vienna in 1920 because he fell in love with a Christian cabaret dancer; of her paternal grandmother, who arrived in Chile later with a number tattooed on her arm; and of her great-grandmother from Odessa, who loved the Spanish language so much that she repeated its harmonious sounds even in her sleep. Agosín’s A Cross and a Star is a moving testament to endurance and to the power of memory and words.
The 2022 edition includes a collection of important new photographs, a new afterword by the author, and a foreword by Ruth Behar.