Daisy Cubías

Daisy Cubías, a native of El Salvador, is a poet, educator, and a long-time human rights activist. She left El Salvador as a young woman to study and work in the United States, and moved to Milwaukee in 1970. In the early 1980s, her brother, sister, and sister's husband were murdered by the Salvadoran armed forces. Much of her poetry and activism is a response to the horror and tragedy of events in her native country. Her poetry reflects the pain of war and the solidarity of revolutionaries and those who would work for peace. Ms. Cubías has toured extensively in Central America with her bilingual poetry and her message of peace and self-determination. Her work has appeared in the Catholic Worker, Varedades Magazine, and in the anthologies A Confluence of Colors (1984), and I Didn't Know There Were Latinos in Wisconsin (1989). She is the author of Children of War: Poems of Love, Pain, Hope and Determination (1989), and is co-author with Fran Leeper Buss of a novel for young people, Journey of the Sparrows (1991), which won the 1991 International Women for Peace and Freedom Janet Adams Award. The book was also selected as an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, and has been translated into several languages, including Spanish. In 1998, Journey of the Sparrows was adapted for the stage by Meryl Friedman and premiered at the Lifeline Theatre in Chicago, receiving excellent reviews. The book has also been developed into a curriculum for middle-schoolers, which has been adopted at schools in Boston, Mass., Washington, D.C., and Oakland, Calif. Today Ms. Cubías, her son, and her remaining family members live in Milwaukee.