Marjorie Becker is the author of Setting the Virgin on Fire: Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán Peasants and the Redemption of the Mexican Revolution (University of California Press, 1995) and the forthcoming “Dancing on the Sun Stone: An Exploration of Mexican Women and the Gendered Politics of Octavio Paz.” She is also a poet and the author of the poetry collections Body Bach and Piano Glass/Glass Piano.

A native of Macon Georgia, she was trained in Spanish from childhood. She studied in Spain, served in the Peace Corps in South America, and worked as a professional journalist writing about race relations in the Deep South. She holds a doctorate and two master’s degrees from Yale University in Latin American history and another history master’s from Duke University. Much of her historical and poetic writing focuses on Mexico’s 1910 revolution, Frida Kahlo, a group of rural dancers she discovered, and on the poetics of Octavio Paz. She has received numerous grants and awards, including a Faculty Fulbright research fellowship, fellowships from the N.E.H., the ACLS, the American Association of University Women, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Center for U.S. Mexican Studies. She recently won a U.S.C. Mellon Mentoring Award.

Her poetry has appeared in Runes, The Cape Rock, Askew, 51%, Spillway, Chaparral, Rethinking History, in the collections, Writing on Napkins at the Sunshine Club: Poets Writing in Macon, The Southern Poetry Anthology, Blue Arc West: An Anthology of California Poets, So Luminous the Wildflowers: An Anthology of California Poets, and many other venues. She was one of the runners-up in the Second Beyond Baroque Poetry Contest. She is also a long-standing co-host of a Southern California poetry salon. An associate professor of Latin American history at the University of Southern California, she lives in Santa Monica.

More information can be found on the USC Dornsife web site.