Dec 28, 2009

Accounting | Claribel Alegría: Human-Rights Activist and Poet

In the following essay, Crosby discusses the roles Alegría has fulfilled as both a human-rights activist and poet.

“My main concern, rather than to talk about me, is to talk about my countries,” says Claribel Alegría in the Fall 1989 issue of Curbstone Ink. “To talk about what is happening in El Salvador and Nicaragua is important,” she continues. “Just to let people know what is happening right there, right then: that’s my main concern. Nicaragua and El Salvador. I consider them both my countries.”

Alegría, who was born in Nicaragua on 12 May 1924 and grew up in El Salvador, is one of the major contemporary voices in the struggle for liberation in Central America. As a...