CWRU Faculty & Staff Authors

Anne Frank was a young Jewish girl forced into hiding with her family by the Nazi regime that occupied the Netherlands in the Second World War. No one would have known of her, her family or their fate had it not been for the survival of the diary that she kept during this time, a book that has long been an inspiration to the poet and writer Marjorie Agosín. In her quest to introduce more young people to this tragic tale of the irrepressible Anne, the author provides a lyrical and engaging imagining of Anne's world. Through Anne's eyes, the reader is taken on the family's journey: their flight from Hitler's Germany, the excitement of a new start in Amsterdam and their eventual confinement in a small set of hidden rooms where they lived in fear of discovery, transportation and likely death.

One of the most celebrated texts of the Hispanic Baroque, El sue#65533;o has been identified by critics as one of the inaugural voices of a Latin American feminist literary tradition. This study is unique in that it focuses upon the poetic conception of space within the text. It is through the exploration and exploitation of the dialectics of physical space that Sor Juana is able to construct a verbal labyrinth that genuinely reflects the intricacies and ambiguities inherent in the word and the world of seventeenth-century colonial Mexico. On the wings of poetic imagination, Sor Juana emerges from the marginalized depths of silence and shadows, transgressing spatiotemporal boundaries within the literary act, in the attempt to discover and colonize a space of her own, in which to freely express herself in the quest for omniscience and subjective identity.

“I only wanted to write about them, / Narrate their fierce audacity, / Their voyages through the channels of the Mediterranean.” So begins a poetic journey through the islands of the Mediterranean that served as homes and refuge for the Sephardic Jews after the Alhambra Decree, which ordered their expulsion from Spain. Inspired by her own journey to Salonika and the Greek Islands, Rhodes, Crete, as well as the Balkans, Marjorie Agosín searches for the remnants of the Sepharad. Presented in a beautiful bilingual Spanish-English edition, Agosín’s poems speak to a wandering life of exile on distant shores. We hear the rhythm of the waves and the Ladino-inflected voices of Sephardi women past and present: Paloma, Estrella, and Luna in the fullness of their lives, loves, dreams, and faith. An evocative and sensual voyage to communities mostly lost after the Holocaust, The White Islands offers a lighthouse of remembrance, a lyrical world recovered with language and song, lament and joy, longing and hope.

Exquisite word portraits of women by one of the past century's greatest women writers. Theserecados--brief, descriptive essays--paint vivid pictures of some of the most extraordinary women of Mistral's generation--and give us insights into Mistral herself. In these pieces, Mistral infuses the traditionally objective essay form with the intimate and subjective, thereby creating an alternate space for women intellectuals in the public sphere. Her subjects range from her own beloved mother to well-known writers such as Victoria Ocampo and Emily Bront#65533;, artists such as Chilean sculptor Laura Rodig and dancer Isadora Duncan, and to topics including feminism, women and politics, and women and education. Gabriela Mistral (1889--1957) is the only woman from Latin America to win the Nobel Prize. A native of Chile, she spent the final years of her life in the United States.