In honor of International Women’s Day, the National Hispanic Cultural Center hosted Albuquerque’s first International Women’s Day Poetry Show on Tuesday Night.
The inaugural event was coordinated and hosted by Liza Wolff-Francis, a poet and member of the Women & Creativity organization.
Wolff-Francis said the goal of the event was to bring people together in celebration of International Women’s Day and what it means.
“It means a celebration of women and who we are,” she said. “It also means a celebration of a fight: a fight for equality, a fight for there not to be violence against women (and) a fight for there to be a presence for women and (their) voices ... not just a tolerance of (them).”
Wolf-Francis chose to do this by creating a poetry reading show because she wanted a variety of voices from different cultures to be heard, she said.
“I just feel like as women there are so many things that we don’t know about each other,” she said. “I think it’s important to share some of that and I think that can be shared through poetry.”
The reading featured poems from numerous female poets – ranging from a fifth grade girl to women of the baby boomer generation – sharing original works and their favorite poems about the experience of womanhood. Among the poets were Jasmine Cuffee, a Native American studies major and Alysia Coriz, a psychology double major at UNM.
Cuffee read one original poem, the “Wife of God,” and one poem by Jessica Helen Lopez called “The Womb is Not.”
“Being a female writer means a lot of things to me. It gives me an opportunity to tell my story from my own perspective without having anybody control what that mean,” Cuffee said. “It gives me the autonomy and the independence to really say what’s on my mind without being interrupted.”
She also said she hopes listeners took the stories shared and thought about how to appreciate and honor the women in their lives beyond Women’s History Month.
Coriz’ poems focused more specifically on her experience of being an indigenous woman from the San Domingo Pueblo.
She said she felt being a female writer meant she had a certain obligation to write about her experiences and the oppression that still exists within her community as well as all communities.
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“I write to talk about my life and how I’ve grown as a woman and grown in an indigenous community as well as in the city,” Coriz said.
Coriz said International Women’s Day for her is a chance to show there is a commonality between women of all cultures, whether they come from an indigenous community or somewhere else, and all of them should be honored.
“You’re celebrating all the women that are in your life as well as (those who) are making a difference in the world,” she said. They are the people that are bringing life to this world. They are the people taking care of and raising the new leaders of the world.”
International Women’s Day is over, but Women’s History Month will progress throughout the rest of March.
Wolff-Francis said she hopes to make the International Women’s Day Poetry Reading Show an annual event in celebration of this holiday.
Skylar Griego is a culture reporter at the Daily Lobo. She can be reached at culture@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @TDLBooks.
