Podcast 413: La Poeta Magdalena Gómez
Autora. Poeta. Dramaturgoa. Libretista.
Magdalena Gómez is Poet Laureate of Springfield, MA, where she co-founded Teatro V!da, a performing arts collective; she is also an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, the author of Shameless Woman (Red Sugarcane Press) and Bullying: Replies, Rebuttals, Confessions, and Catharsis (Skyhorse, 2012), a winner of Fordham University’s 2019 Latinas 50 Plus Literature Award, the 2019 Latinx Excellence on the Hill Award from the Black and Latino Legislative Caucus of MA State House, and other arts awards.
Her widely acclaimed musical play Dancing in My Cockroach Killers (2013) is a performing arts piece consisting of a collection of Gómez’s poems and monologues set to music by composer Desmar Guevara. It has been performed in Los Angeles, DC, Massachusetts, and Off-Broadway in New York City.
Ms. Gómez is also a New England Public Radio commentator, national speaker and columnist with the Point of View Newspaper. She is the co-editor of Bullying: Replies, Rebuttals, Confessions and Catharsis, the first multicultural, intergenerational and multi- genre anthology on bullying. A book of her poetry, Shameless Woman, was recently released by Red Sugarcane Press, NYC. Her role in the Nuyorican Literary movement was recently cited in In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam, by scholar and poet Urayoán Noel. The University of Connecticut Storrs invited Ms. Gomez for the coveted honor of housing her literary archives at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center.
Born to a Puerto Rican mother and Spanish Roma father, Gómez has been writing, performing and telling stories since early childhood. A devotee of Lorca, Emerson and Chinese women poets since the third grade, this eclectic thinker is at once fierce and tender, one who creates a mystical bond with every audience.
