Morejón, Nancy (1944–)

Nancy Morejón (b. 7 August 1944), Cuban poet. Born in Havana to Angélica Hernández and Felipe Morejón, she received a degree in French from the University of Havana. A translator, journalist, editor, and director of the Centro de Estudios del Caribe at Casa de las Américas, Morejón has published four critical studies and eleven collections of poetry. Her lyrical verse, shaped by an Afro-Cuban sensibility and a feminist consciousness, evokes the intimacy of family, the ephemerality of love, and the significance of Cuban history. Poems like "Black Woman" and "I Love My Master" have been widely anthologized and translated. In 1986, her work Piedra pulida won the Cuban Premio de la Crítica. She was the first black woman to win Cuba's National Prize for literature, in 2001.

See alsoLiterature: Spanish America .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Translations include Grenada Notebook, translated by Lisa Davis (1984); Where the Island Sleeps Like a Wing, translated by Kathleen Weaver (1985); and Ours the Earth, translated by J. R. Pereira (1990). On Morejón, see Susan Willis, "Nancy Morejón: Wrestling History from Myth," in Literature and Contemporary Culture 1 (1984–1985): 247-256; Claudette Rosegreen-Williams, "Re-writing the History of the Afro-Cuban Woman: Nancy Morejón's 'Mujer negra,'" in Afro-Hispanic Review 8, no. 3 (1989): 7-13; Yvonne Captain-Hidalgo, "Nancy Morejón," in Spanish American Women Writers, edited by Diane Marting (1990); Keith Ellis, "Nancy Morejón," in Spanish American Authors: The Twentieth Century, edited by Angel Flores (1992).

Additional Bibliography

Pérez Sarduy, Pedro, and Jean Stubbs. Afro-Cuban Voices: On Race and Identity in Contemporary Cuba. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000.

Rowell, Charles H. Making Callaloo: 25 Years of Black Literature, 1976–2000. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2002.

Tapscott, Stephen. Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology. Austin: University of Texas, 1996.

                                 Miriam DeCosta-Willis