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.
__________________________________________________________________________________
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.
10 December 2023 marks the 75th anniversary of one of the world's most groundbreaking global pledges: the 
