Daisy Zamora

Daisy Zamora, revolutionary poet, essayist, and translator, was born on June 20, 1950, in Managua, Nicaragua, to a bourgeois family with ties to the liberal Zelaya government. When she was four years old, her father was arrested for participating in an attempted coup against the Somoza dictatorship. She was subsequently raised by her grandparents and great-aunt, and was greatly influenced by her grandfather’s political views. She went on to study psychology at the Universidad de Centroamericano, where her poetic style evolved in line with her own political maturation alongside her more radical classmates.

In Chinandega, Nicaragua, Zamora worked in collaboration with the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) to unionize mill laborers, raise money, collect arms, and transform their home into a refuge for guerillas. Her participation as a combatant for the Sandinistas in the August 22, 1978, offensive on the National Palace would eventually lead to her brief exile from Nicaragua, but had no hindrance on her efforts to support the socialist movement from Costa Rica, Honduras, and Panama, where Zamora hosted the radio program The Sandinista Women for the clandestine Radio Sandino. A year later, she returned home to serve as vice minister of culture.

Translated into thirty-plus languages and the author of nearly a dozen poetry collections, as well as an editor and translator, Zamora’s English translations include: The Violent Foam: New and Selected Poems (Curbstone Press, 2002); Life for Each (KATABASIS Press, 1994); Riverbed of Memory (City Light Books, 1992); and Clean Slate (Curbstone Press, 1992). She is also the editor of La Mujer Nicaragüense en la Poesía [The Nicaraguan Woman in Poetry] (Editorial Nueva Nicaragua, 1992), the first anthology of Nicaraguan women poets.

The recipient of the 1977 Premio de Poesía Mariano Fiallos Gil de la Universidad Autónoma de Nicaragua, Zamora is also the winner of Nicaragua’s 2006 National Association of Artists’s Writer of the Year, as well as Spain’s 2023 XXIII Premio Casa de América de Poesía Americana. She has also received recognition and honors from the Nicaraguan Writers’ Center and the California Arts Council.

Zamora lives between Managua and San Francisco, where she teaches in the University of San Francisco’s department of Latina/o studies.