Diana Garcia, a professor in the Division of Humanities and Communication, joined U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera and others in a reading March 9 at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

The poetry reading commemorated the groundbreaking exhibition honoring United Farm Workers co-founder Dolores Huerta.

The exhibit runs through early May. It is part of the gallery’s “One Life” series highlighting people who have made significant contributions to life in the United States. Huerta is the first Latina to be included in the series.

The exhibit’s opening last July coincided with the 50th anniversary of the 1965 grape strike and boycott that lasted five years. Those actions resulted in the farmworker union’s first contract with growers. Last fall, while she was in Washington to preview the exhibit, Robert Casper, director of the Poetry and Literature Center at the Library of Congress, invited Garcia to record some of her poems for the library’s archive as part of its growing body of Hispanic literature. Garcia is the co-director of the Creative Writing and Social Action Program at CSUMB, and her own work is influenced by an awareness of the issues that affect impoverished, often minority, communities. In her first collection of poems, When Living Was a Labor Camp – which won an American Book Award – she tells the stories of migrant-worker life. Her poems are attuned to the sensory details of migrants’ lives, as well as the political ramifications of their experiences.

Published March 11, 2016