Imagine that you fled your country to find refuge in another  as the Covid virus hit: lockdown for months without work or resources. 

My name is Marie Howe and I am raising money for a brilliant poet and a life-long  servant of the art of poetry, Nidia Hernandez

Nidia  is currently seeking legal asylum in the U.S after fleeing Venezuela , a failed state,  where  over 1.2 million people are displaced by food shortages, unemployment, and political chaos and corruption. 

She is the  director of the multimedia poetry editorial project La Maja Desnuda, an ongoing website housing a multimedia archive for poetry, with biographies, images and especially, voices of poets narrating their work. The growing collection concentrates on Venezuela and Latin America, but includes numerous other international artists.   

The portal is complemented by a radio program on poetry, also called La Maja Desnuda, which Nidia hosted  on the air for more than 22 years, broadcasting in
Venezuela. More than 1144 programs were produced, presenting the most representative voices in world poetry, including: Walt Whitman, Tomas Transprimer, Adonis, Pär Lagerkvist, Jorge Borges, César Vallejo, Miguel Hernandez, Sophia de Mello, T.S. Eliot and Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Nidia arrived in the US and in Cambridge MA weeks  before the Covid struck and the quarantine began.    She is  working on a collaboration with Arrowsmith Press--curating a monthly feature on contemporary Latin American Poetry which is currently available on the Arrowsmith website as well as on Spotify. She is also editing a book of translations of the poetry of Rafael Cadenas which Arrowsmith will publish in May 2021.      But the quarantine has kept her from finding  funding as she awaits news of her asylum request.   

This fundraiser would see her through the next months as the lockdown slowly lifts.    

Anything amount you can offer - no matter how small --  will be of help to her.        And  It's a tough time,  if you can't give, would you spread the word?

Thank you so very much.