Aurora Levins-Morales

steering committee member

Aurora Levins Morales (she/her) was born in Castañer, Puerto Rico in 1954 to a Harlem Puerto Rican mother and a Brooklyn Ashkenazi Jewish father. Raised in the Puerto Rican mountain town of Maricao and then in Chicago, Aurora was surrounded by art and science, political debate and intellectual engagement. The youngest member of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, Aurora became an activist at an early age. She relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1976 where she worked with movement organizations like the Puerto Rican Socialist Party and New Jewish Agenda and radical cultural groups like La Peña and the Third World News Bureau.

A poet, essayist and fiction writer, Aurora’s work has been widely recognized in both US feminist and Puerto Rican literary traditions. She was a contributor to This Bridge Called My Back (1981) and in 1986 co-authored Getting Home Alive with her mother, Rosario Morales. Aurora’s other work includes: Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals, Remedios: Stories of Earth and Iron from the History of  Puertorriqueñas, Kindling: Writings on the Body, Cosecha and Other Stories, also with Rosario Morales, and most recently, Silt: Prose Poems. She was a regular contributor to Bridges: A Journal for Jewish Feminists and Our Friends, and her work appears in Wrestling with Zion (2003) and four other Jewish collections. Her fiction, poetry and non-fiction have been widely anthologized and taught. She is recognized as an important contemporary Puerto Rican and Jewish writer.

Aurora participates in many social movements, primarily as an artist. These include many varieties of feminism and anti-racism, Middle East Peace, Disability Justice, food justice and Puerto Rican sovereignty. She is passionate about building an effective response to our ecological crisis and believes in the power of art to change minds. She is the founder and resident poet of Rimonim, a collaborative project to create new Jewish liturgy and ritual that is joy based, diasporic, centers Indigenous Jews and Jews of Color, and offers spiritual tools to help us rise to the challenges of our time. In December, 2019, Aurora moved back to her childhood home in Maricao where she is writing, farming and organizing.