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Marjorie Agosin, poet and Wellesley professor who championed Latina writers, dies at 69

'From the time I was quite small I sat at my desk conversing with words,' she wrote in Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Dr. Agosin, the Andrew W. Mellon professor in the humanities at Wellesley College, died of cancer on March 10. She was 69 and lived in Wellesley. Advertisement 'Without a doubt, she stood out as the most eloquent, knowledgeable, profound, and prolific Latin American Jewish woman poet and writer residing in the United States,' For Dr. Agosin, Spanish was a 'wild and gentle language,' one she embraced for consolation and inspiration. In her poem 'The Alphabet,' she wrote: Advertisement Mother tongue, come back to me, awaken me. 'Marjorie's creative muse had a Spanish-speaking soul,' 'And although she could express herself beautifully in English, she chose to write primarily in Spanish,' Kostopulos-Cooperman said. 'Writing in her native language, and then seeing her words in translation, made her even more aware of how her poetry and prose could create bridges with a new community of readers, and how this newfound kinship would not only rescue her from the solitude of exile, but also help her to recover and preserve a past that was deeply rooted in her soul and in her memory.' The multigenerational experiences of immigration and exile in Dr. Agosin's own family helped provide insight into dislocation of others whose lives and work she championed, including by editing anthologies for US readers. 'Marjorie was a fierce advocate for those who were mistreated, overlooked, or silenced,' The United Nations, the Chilean government, and 'She believed in the power of writing as a means of seeking justice,' Behar wrote. In her memoir 'The Alphabet in My Hands,' Dr. Agosin wrote that 'writing was a way to save myself and others.' Advertisement Her dozens of books included the young adult novel 'I Lived on Butterfly Hill,' a pair of memoirs that drew on her parents' immigrant experiences, and the poetry collection Dr. Agosin's son, Joseph, said that just days before she died, his mother finished coediting 'Fragmented Geographies,' an anthology of Jewish women's writings in the Balkans and Latin America. As a teacher, Dr. Agosin 'was relentlessly optimistic about building a better world,' Sarah Katz, a Wellesley graduate who had been one of her students, said in the Zoom gathering. 'She fought for what was right even when it wasn't popular. She spoke louder for those whose voices were being drowned out.' 'Marjorie was beloved by many,' said Born in Bethesda, Md., on June 15, 1955, Dr. Agosin was a daughter of Frida Halpern, who had been born on the border of Chile and Peru, and Moises Agosin, a chemistry professor and researcher who had been born in France. She was 3 months old when her father took a teaching position Childhood memories from her early years always seemed ready to leap from the prose of 'The Alphabet in My Hands' into lines of poetry. She recalled that as a girl, her apron was decorated 'with patches of many colors, like the breath of peace.' And when the weather turned inclement, rain 'arrived in the immenseness of night, as if death had arrived, inopportune, without warning.' Advertisement As a girl in predominantly Catholic Chile, she was ever aware of being an outsider. 'To be Jewish in Chile was to be above all a foreigner,' she wrote. Dr. Agosin was 16 when her father took a teaching job at the University of Georgia and moved the family from Chile back to the United States. Two years later, when General Augusto Pinochet staged a coup in Chile, her family couldn't return and remained in Georgia, in a new kind of exile. In Behar's tribute, she wrote that Dr. Agosin 'felt out of place in the United States, where she had to continually explain her identity to people who could not understand how she could be blonde, speak Spanish without looking Latina, and also be Jewish.' Dr. Agosin graduated from the University of Georgia with a bachelor's degree in psychology and South American literature. One day while stacking books in the college library, she met John Wiggins. They went on to marry and to get doctorates at the University of Indiana — she in Latin American literature, he in physics. His work included being a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and creating computer codes for Cisco Systems. Dr. Agosin began teaching at Wellesley in 1982. 'I came to Wellesley College because they had told me that they liked women who were eccentric, solitary, angular like lost angels from Paradise on Earth,' she wrote. The couple had two children and bought a second home in Ogunquit, Maine. Dr. Agosin traveled often for work and pleasure — back to Chile when the political situation improved, and to Austria and other countries. Advertisement Her children — Joseph, who now lives in Los Angeles, and Sonia of Wellesley — often accompanied their mother. 'She very much instilled in my sister and I a love for the arts and a love of travel,' Joseph said. In addition to her husband and two children, Dr. Agosin leaves her sister, Cynthia Stanojevich of Marietta, Ga., and her brother, Mario of Atlanta. Though Dr. Agosin wrote in many forms, she always returned to poems. As a child, her family spent vacations near the residence of Pablo Neruda, the Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet. 'They built a friendship,' Joseph said, and Neruda 'helped inspire her to pursue poetry.' In 'The Alphabet in My Hands,' Dr. Agosin wrote: 'I arrive at words the way one arrives at spells.' Writing, she added, 'is a form of love, of loving and being loved.' Bryan Marquard can be reached at