Luz María Umpierre
| Luz María "Luzma" Umpierre | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1947 Santurce, Puerto Rico |
| Occupation | Human Rights Advocate, New-Humanist Educator, Poet, and Scholar |
| Nationality | American |
| Notable works | The Margarita Poems, For Christine, Y otras desgracias/And Other Misfortunes, En el país de las maravillas, Pour toi/For Moira, Our Only Island, I'm Still Standing: 30 Years of Poetry. |
| Notable awards | Michael Lynch Award for Service LGBT(MLA), Distinguished Woman of Maine, Distinguished Alumna in the Humanities (Universidad del Sagrado Corazón), Woman of the Year (Western Kentucky University), Ford Foundation Fellow, NEH Grant. |
| Website | |
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Luz María "Luzma" Umpierre-Herrera (born in 1947, Santurce, Puerto Rico) is an American human rights advocate, New-Humanist educator, poet, and scholar. She currently resides in Florida. Umpierre-Herrera works on the topics of activism and social equality, the immigrant experience and bilingualism in the United States, and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) issues. To date, she has published ten books of poetry, had her poems published in over 26 different anthologies, and has over 50 essays published in academic journals.
Luz María Umpierre was born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, in 1947, and grew up in a working-class neighborhood called "La veintiuna" (Stop 21) in a household with sixteen people.[1][2] Her mother was born in Puerto Rico and grew up in New York City; for this reason, Umpierre was exposed to English and Spanish as a child. Her father was a government worker. Umpierre studied at the Sacred Heart Academy and at the Universidad del Sagrado Corazón, both in Puerto Rico, graduating from both with honors.
After several years of teaching at the Academia María Reina in San Juan, Umpierre felt that she was in “sexile.” The prejudice she experienced as an open lesbian in the island was one of the contributing factors to her moving to the mainland in 1974. As she followed her academic path, she was shocked to see that in the United States it wasn’t her just sexual orientation that was prejudiced against, but also her Puerto Rican origin and ethnicity. These experiences helped forge the core of her desire to be a mentor to underprivileged and exiled students, American-born like her and immigrant alike.
She earned her B.A., with Honors, in Spanish and Humanities from the Universidad del Sagrado Corazón in 1970. In 1976, she received her M.A. in Spanish (Caribbean Literature) from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, where we also completed her Ph.D. in Spanish (1978). She has also completed Post Doctoral Studies in the Fields of: Literary Theory at the University of Kansas (1981-1982), University Administration (Recruitment and Retention of Minorities) as a State of New Jersey/Woodrow Wilson International Center Fellow (1986), and Management and Policy at the New School for Social Research, Milano School-Syracuse Campus (1995-1996).
After receiving her Ph.D. in 1978, Umpierre went on to teach at several institutions. She was the first Puerto Rican to receive tenure at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Rutgers University, where she taught the very first graduate level course on Colonial Latin American Literature. She also created the first courses on Caribbean Literature and Culture at Rutgers University, as well as one of the first courses on Latinas in the U.S. to be taught in the country.
Her presence as an open lesbian Latina academic at Rutgers was met with a conservative backlash. She was banned in 1989 from teaching at the university for her inclusion of Gay and Lesbian texts in her literature classes and after she spoke at the March on Washington, DC of 1987. This setback only reinforced her activism regarding LGBT Studies, as she’s continued to be an activist for the inclusion of LGBT topics in academia.
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