Nicaraguan Activist Poet Claribel Alegría Dies at 93

Nicaraguan-born poet and "a voice for the voiceless and the dispossessed" Claribel Alegría has died at the age of 93, reports the New York Times's Neil Genzlinger. "Ms. Alegría considered El Salvador her homeland, and she had been returning regularly to visit, but that changed in 1980." More:

She was scheduled to give a poetry reading at the Sorbonne in Paris but learned the day before that El Salvador’s archbishop, Óscar Arnulfo Romero, a prominent voice against social injustice and government repression, had been assassinated. Instead of reading poems the next day, she talked about the murder and the campaign of violence by the military government, which was backed by the United States.

“Soon after that, my cousin, Vides Casanova, then minister of defense, sent word that I should never come back to El Salvador,” Ms. Alegría told Bomb magazine in 2000. “Otherwise, he would not be responsible for what happened to me.”

She was not able to return for 12 years, during which El Salvador was in civil war. Her poem “Unfinished Rite” is about not being able to return for her mother’s funeral in 1982.

In the 1980s she and her husband, who died in 1995, returned to Nicaragua to live. Their books together included the histories “Tunnel to Canto Grande,” about the escape of political prisoners in Peru in 1990, and “Death of Somoza,” about the Sandinista commandos who assassinated the exiled Nicaraguan politician Anastasio Somoza in 1980.

Ms. Alegría’s many books of poetry include “Flowers From the Volcano” (1982) and the bilingual collection “Saudade/Sorrow” (1999). She also wrote children’s books.

Read more about Alegría at the NYT.