Human Rights Day Program

 

For Immediate Release:

 RENOWNED POET AND ACTIVIST MAGDALENA GÓMEZ TO SPEAK IN AMHERST

ON RIGHTS OF THE CHILD FOR HUMAN RIGHTS DAY, DECEMBER 10TH

 Contact: Martha Spiegelman, spiegelmanmartha@gmail.com

 

Human Rights Day Program, Saturday, December 10, 2022, 1 to 3:30 PM,

 

in the Woodbury Room, Jones Library, 43 Amity Street, Amherst MA,

 

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

 

The Amherst Chapter of Amnesty International, moved by Magdalena Gomez’s lifelong commitment to human rights and her connection with the rights of the child, has invited her, the recent poet laureate of

Springfield (2019-2022), to speak on Human Rights Day. Gomez’s talk: Rights of the Child/ Voice of the

Child: An Urgent Listening, draws from her childhood memoir, Mi’ja: A Memoir Noir (Heliotrope Books, NYC). Gomez will address how each of us can champion child rights, beginning with our own communities.

Gómez is the daughter of a Spanish Roma immigrant, and a Puerto Rican mother, and examines the societal roots of child violation. Gomez’s theatrical, poetic and provocative background promises a rousing presentation.

 During December, as well, the Student Human Rights Art Exhibit, now in its ninth year, created by Amherst Regional Middle School students, will be on display in the Jones Library. Students have created artworks inspired by the United Nation’s 30 articles in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They will make a short presentation in the program on December 10th.

 Human Rights Day, December 10th, commemorates the date, in 1948, that the United Nations approved the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was largely through the efforts of Eleanor Roosevelt, first U.S. delegate to the UN and chairperson of the committee, that we have this crucial founding document which was unanimously approved by UN members. On the heels of the atrocities of World War II, Eleanor Roosevelt was determined to meet the need for identifying basic human rights for all people. The UDHR is recognized today as having paved the way for the adoption of more than 70 human rights treaties at both regional and global levels.

 Moreover, the Human Rights Day observance in Amherst calls to attention another significant UN document, The Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted by the UN in 1989. The Convention has been ratified by every nation except the U.S.  At this forum, we will discuss the question and U.S resistance to ratifying this important document. 

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      Magdalena Gómez is an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow (2021-2022) and the Springfield      Poet Laureate (2019-2022) Her poems have been set to music and performed Off-Broadway and across the U.S.; Montreal, and Paris. She toured the U.S.as a jazz poet with Chinese-American composer and baritone saxophonist, the late Fred Ho, for a decade. Venues for her poetry performances have included Lincoln Center, NYC; The Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM); Union Theater, Wisconsin; The Los Angeles Theater Company; Gala Theater, in Washington D.C.; the San Francisco State Poetry Center, and the Montreal Jazz Festival. In 2018 she received a New England Public Media Arts and Humanities Award.

     Her recently published memoir noir, Mi’ja, Heliotrope Books, NYC, has been hailed by readers and scholars across the US and Europe:  “Gómez’s masterpiece heals as it startles, a chronology of nuestra America from the vantage point of the South Bronx in the last quarter of the 20th Century. ---Dr. Benjamin Barson, composer, musician and Fulbright-García Robles Scholar.