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My name is Aurora Levins Morales and I'm a writer. I was born in 1954 in Indiera Baja, Maricao, in the mountains of western Puerto Rico.  My mother is Puerto Rican, born in Harlem; my father is Ukrainian Jewish, born in Brooklyn.  The first two rules I learned were "never deface a book" and "never cross a picket line."  I grew up in a house full of books, in the middle of a rainforest.  My father is an ecologist.  My mother's many occupations have included painter, printmaker and fabric artist, naturalist, writer and student of anthropology and philosophy of science. There was a microscope on the kitchen table and lots of art supplies within reach.
 
I've been writing since I learned the alphabet, but I became a public writer in the 1970s as part of the explosion of new writing that came out of the many social justice movements of that time.  At fourteen I'd spent a summer in Cuba with my family, meeting people from all over the world, and getting to witness the transformation of a country very much like my own. My brother Ricardo and I went there as children of activists and came back as activists in our own right.  At fifteen, I was the youngest member of the Chicago Women Liberation Union and co-produced a feminist radio show.  I took part in sit-ins and demonstrations against the Viet Nam war, guerrilla theater, women's consciousness raising groups and door to door organizing for daycare and equal pay.  I also read the work of poets from many parts of the world and newly emerging, mostly white feminist writers in the US.

I went to college in a very small, very white northern New Hampshire town and helped organize and run the local women's center, read Robert Frost on his own turf, and translated the poetry of Neruda.  I also studied marine biology and spent a magical summer among iguanas and sea turtles on the Caribbean island of Mona.  In 1976, I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, and immersed myself in a vibrant political and artistic world made up of people from all over the world.  I worked at the KPFA Third World News Bureau, reporting on events in South Africa, the Philippines, Chile, Nicaragua and what was still Rhodesia, and on environmental racism, housing struggles, and the movement to get the US Navy to stop bombing Vieques, Puerto Rico.

I also became part of the great upsurge of US women of color writers.  I began doing coffeehouse readings with other women, organizing poetry series, producing radio programs of our writing and music, publishing in tiny magazines and chapbooks, and eventually becoming one of the contributors to This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color, which gave me the credentials to start speaking at colleges about a whole range of topics.  Which I did for twenty-five years.
 
In 1986 my mother and I wrote a book called Getting Home Alive. It's a collection of poetry and prose about our lives as US Puerto Rican women. After it was published, many people told us they had never recognized their own lives in a book before.  Because I saw the impact of seeing our stories in print, I began thinking about the bigger, deeper, broader stories of history, and decided to train as a professional historian, so I spent most of the 1990s in graduate school.  [See "The Historian As Curandera," soon to be posted.]

There will soon be places on this site where you can look up the books I've written and read excerpts.  I will also be posting a gallery of recent, unpublished pieces, and some of my KPFA Poet On Assignment poems-commentaries on the news that began following 9/11 and were broadcast for the next several years on Pacifica's Flashpoints.

There will also be a section called OtheRico, where you can find out about my two Puerto Rican Diaspora projects. The first is the California Century exhibit, based on the life stories and photographs of Puerto Rican elders in the San Francisco Bay Area, some of whose parents came here in 1900.  The second is
OtheRicans: Voices from the Greater Puerto Rican Diaspora an  anthology I'm editing with Vanessa Perez Rosario, showcasing the writing of Puerto Ricans who are not from Puerto Rico OR New York.
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There are a lot of things I'm thinking and writing about these days: the global ecological crisis, disability and chronic illness, the role of US Jews in working for peace in Israel/Palestine, the exciting transformations happening in South America, indigenous people's worldwide leadership in environmental organizing, radical sustainability (as opposed to green consumerism.)  In addition to my own writings, I'll be posting links to other people's writing, artwork and organizing projects.

Rules of Conversation:
I'm looking for interesting discussion, not shouting matches.  When you're in my house, speak respectfully to and about other people.  Feel free to express disagreements and make your case, but if you make personal attacks or use oppressive language you'll be booted.

I encourage anyone who posts to introduce her/him/hirself.  The internet allows for all kinds of fantasy identities, but knowing each other as real people is much more interesting.