Marjorie Agosín, the human rights activist and prolific author of fiction, poetry, and children’s books, has died at 69. Her death was announced on the Swellesley Report, a website that covers news in Wellesley, Massachusetts, where Agosín lived.
Agosín was born in Maryland, raised in Chile and the U.S, and educated at the University of Georgia and Indiana University. In 1982, she began teaching in the Spanish department at Wellesley College, where she remained for over 40 years.
Her books often focused on Jewish identity and on the human rights abuses perpetrated under Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Her collections of poetry include At the Threshold of Memory, Toward the Splendid City, and Sargasso; she also wrote the memoirs Always From Somewhere Else and The Alphabet in My Hands.
Her 2014 children’s book, I Lived on Butterfly Hill, translated by E.M. O’Connor and illustrated by Lee White, won the American Library Association’s Pura Belpré Medal and was recently named by Kirkus as one of the Best Middle-Grade Books of the 21st Century (So Far). She wrote a sequel to the book, The Maps of Memory, translated by Alison Ridley and illustrated by White, which was published in 2020. According to an obituary published on the Latin American Jewish Studies Association website, she completed a third book in the series before her death.
Ruth Behar, the author of that obituary, wrote, “In her many impressive roles as a poet, storyteller, editor, scholar, educator, and activist in the field of human rights and women’s rights, Marjorie shone as a creative writer and brave thinker and a woman of integrity, passion, generosity, and brilliance.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
