Nancy Morejón

Nancy Morejón (born 1944 in Havana) is a Cuban poet, critic, and essayist.

She was a recipient of the Struga Poetry Evenings Golden Wreath Award.

She has been called "the best known and most widely translated woman poet of post-revolutionary Cuba".

She was born and raised in a district of old Havana to working-class parents, Angélica Hernández Domínguez and Felipe Morejón Noyola.

Her father is of African heritage, and her mother is of African extraction.

Nancy Morejón graduated with honours from the University of Havana, having studied Caribbean and French literature, and she is fluent in French and English.

She later taught French.

She is a well-regarded translator of French and English into Spanish, particularly Caribbean writers including Edouard Glissant, Jacques Roumain, Aimé Césaire and René Depestre.

In 1982, she was awarded the Cuban "Premio de la Crítica" (Critic's Prize) for Piedra Pulida, and in 2001, she won Cuba's National Prize for Literature, awarded for the first time to a black woman.

This national prize for literature was created in 1983; Nicolás Guillén was the first to receive it.

Her own poetry has been translated into English, German, French, Portuguese, Galician, Russian, Macedonian, and other languages, and is included in the 1992 anthology Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.

She has lectured at universities throughout the country and has taught at Wellesley College and the University of Missouri, which, in 1995, conducted a two-day symposium on her work and published the papers in a special issue of the Afro-Hispanic Review.

In 1999, Howard University Press in Washington, D.C., published in 1999, a collection of critical essays on her work: Singular Like a Bird: The Art of Nancy Morejon, compiled and prefaced by Miriam DeCosta-Willis, Ph.D. A collection of her poems entitled Richard trajo su flauta y otros argumentos (Richard brought his flute), edited by Mario Benedetti at Visor Books, was published in Madrid in the spring of 2005.

Morejón's work explores a range of themes, such as the mythology of the Cuban nation and the relation of the Black people of Cuba within that nation.

She often expresses an integrationist stance, in which Spanish and African cultures fuse to make a new Cuban identity.

Much of her work—and the fact that she has been successful within the Cuban regime—locates her as a supporter of Cuban nationalism and the Cuban Revolution.

In addition, she also voices the situation of women within her society, expressing concern for women's experience and for racial equality within the Cuban Revolution; often, black women are the protagonists in her poems, most notably in the widely anthologized Mujer Negra (Black Woman).

Her work also treats the grievous fact of slavery as an ancestral experience.

Her work treats political themes as well as intimate, familial topics.

Critics have noted her playful observations about her own people, her effective use of particularly Cuban forms of humor, and her regular "indulgence" in highly lyrical, intimate, spiritual, or erotic poetry.

She also won the Golden Wreath of the Struga Poetry Evenings for 2006.

She has toured extensively in the United States and in other countries; her work has been translated into more than ten languages, including English, Swedish and German.

Morejón, as of 2013, is director of Revista Union, the journal of the Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba (the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba; UNEAC); in 2008, she was elected president of the writer's section of UNEAC.

She has produced a number of journalistic, critical, and dramatic works.

One of the most notable is her book-length treatment of poet Nicolás Guillén.